kipple

– ding! ding! ding! sagde dørklokken …
– der er tre pakker, sagde pakkeposten ..!

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Når man nåede støvets år i gamle dage, blev man agtet og æret. Nu får man en robotstøvsuger. (Walther F. Lake)

Øl med bundfald fremmer langsom hældning. (Walther F. Lake)

– min printer fortæller mig når den mangler sort toner ..!
– nå, mit køleskab fortæller mig når der mangler øl …

– jeg læser en bog om den industrielle revolution ..!
– nå, skal jeg fortælle dig hvem der vandt ..?

– solen skinner altid et eller andet sted …
– ja, det er det, der gør det så deprimerende …

Just as The Man in the High Castle features a book entitled The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, depicting a world (but not our own) in which the Allies won World War II, so The Alteration refers to an alternate history book by one Philip K. Dick entitled The Man in the High Castle. This book-within-a-book depicts a world in which Stephen II was never born, so the “Holy Victory” never happened, and Henry VIII became king legitimately. As in our world, Henry married Catherine of Aragon, but their son Henry, Duke of Cornwall survived infancy, becoming Henry IX in 1547. Martin Luther became “schismatic” in this world, as he did in our own, and a “Union” of former English North American colonies breaks away in 1848 instead of 1776. Galliard, an alternate-universe counterpart to Keith Roberts’s Pavane, is also mentioned in this tribute to the subgenre. (The Galliard and the Pavane were both forms of Renaissance dance.)

“Den nye patient på stue 7 må være sømand!” sagde den ældste og grimmeste af sygesøstrene før hun tog en slurk af sin kaffe efter at have hældt et skvæt rom i. ”Hvorfor det?” spurgte en af de andre. ”Han har fået tatoveret ’Adam’ på sin penis!” lød svaret. ”Det er ikke helt rigtigt,” sagde så den yngste og kønneste af de forsamlede sygesøstre, ”for der står Amsterdam …”

Hvor går overgangen mellem lavt til loftet og højt til loftet? (Walther F. Lake)

Livet er ikke andet end logistik og lagkage. (Walther F. Lake)

– kan du ikke anbefale en god bog, walther ..?
– vil du udfordres eller underholdes ..?

– nå, var det godt at få børstet tænder ..?
– ja, nu er der luft imellem fortænderne igen …

Davis has published six collections of short stories, including The Thirteenth Woman and Other Stories (1976) and Break It Down (1986), a Finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her most recent collection was Varieties of Disturbance, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2007 and a Finalist for the National Book Award. The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2009, contains all her stories up to 2008. Davis’ stories are acclaimed for their brevity and humour. Many are only one or two sentences. Some of her stories are considered poetry or somewhere between philosophy, poetry and short story. Of contemporary authors, only Davis, Stuart Dybek, and Alice Fulton share the distinction of appearing in both The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Poetry series. Davis has also translated Proust, Flaubert, Blanchot, Foucault, Michel Leiris, Pierre Jean Jouve and other French writers, as well as the Dutch writer A.L. Snijders.

“Growing up in Ohio was just planning to get out”. (Jim Jarmusch)

Det er ikke let at være samfundet. (Walther F. Lake)

Jeg er træt af at blive fejlciteret på Internettet. (Mark Twain)

– hvorfor citerer man især ældre mennesker ..?
– de husker ikke så godt, albert …

Kandiseret ørevoks. (Walther F. Lake, fra ”Opskrifter og nedture”)

| bestilles via karma records | interview med bo jacobsen basunen.dk |

– jeg kan ikke lade være med at købe bøger …
– hvad er den sidste bog du har købt ..?
– franz kafkas dagbøger …
– hvor meget skal du have for den ..?

The Place of Dead Roads by William S. Burroughs, published in 1983, is the second book of the trilogy that begins with Cities of the Red Night and concludes with The Western Lands. It chronicles the story of a homosexual gunfighter in the American West, beginning with the gunfighter’s death in 1899, incorporates contrasting themes and time travel episodes, and makes use of Burroughs’ extensive knowledge of firearms. Non-linear in construction, it makes use of vivid imagery and repetition but does not employ the famous “cut-up” method of literary collage used in his earlier novels.

Romanpersoner antages til anden del af planlagt trilogi. Den foregår tyve år senere, så du skal være mellem 40 og 50, almindelig af bygning og omgængelig. Prospekt fremsendes på opfordring. Løn efter gældende overenskomst med Dansk Forfatterforening. Ferielukket i hele juli måned. (Walther F. Lake)

In the novel, thanks to technology, children can become smarter and more cynical than adults; such children are known as baby-heads. “Baby-heads” have their own subculture and bars, and can drink alcohol. Animals, too, can be given the intelligence of a human being through bioscientific techniques, a concept explored previously by David Brin in his Uplift novels and Roger Zelazny in The Dream Master. Lethem’s animals stand midway between these two; like Brin’s, they have clearly delineated and delimited rights; like Zelazny’s, however, they are part of a darker symbolism. It is not considered bestiality when one has a sexual relationship with an evolved animal in this world, and humans may also adopt younger evolved animals. Lethem also envisions nerve-swapping technology. Couples trade erogenous zones for the purpose of sexual experimentation. Metcalf previously underwent such a procedure, and is now trapped with a woman’s neuro-sexual apparatus because his girlfriend skipped town with his male one. There are other incidental touches. For an unexplained reason, psychology is no longer viewed as a science, and psychologists behave like Jehovah’s Witnesses, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and other itinerant proselytizing religions. One such couple asks Metcalf if he’d like to listen to selections from Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents. In this future, television is now an abstract art form, and has abandoned linear narrative sequence genres. People are more easily disconcerted in Lethem’s future. Asking questions is considered astonishingly rude, making detectives (or “inquisitors”, as they are known), whose job involves prying, social pariahs. Rather than broadcast bad news to squeamish listeners, the radio plays ominous music instead. (Handguns also come with threatening violin soundtracks.) And everyone is “on the make”–make being a snortable drug available in a dozen different blends (Acceptol, Avoidol, Forgettol) in stores called makeries. But substance abuse still exists in this future- there is a lucrative black market in blanketrol, an earlier version of forgettol and addictol, but highly addictive nevertheless. Pansy Greenleaf is initially addicted to it. Karma is also subject to transactions through portable debit cards. Once someone’s karma reaches zero, they are sentenced to specific periods of cryogenic respite until they “work off” their karmic “debt”. Lethem went on to further explore this idea in his later novel Amnesia Moon, in which “luck ratings” served a similar role to Gun’s karma. However, unscrupulous criminal elements in this society have developed “slaveboxes”, neural implants which activate the inert central nervous systems of the sleepers, using their bodies for prostitution or slave labour while unconscious. Metcalf himself is frozen late in the book. After six years, he is thawed out, only to find that memory retention has become a social taboo, and people now have prompters installed to provide retrospective commentary about past events in their lives. As a result, “makeries” only supply one standardized blend, with forgettol paramount. Private investigation is also illegal.

Sov dig vågen. (Walther F. Lake)

Epepe, written in 1970, is the first of Karinthy’s novels to be translated into English, appearing as Metropole in 2008. This essentially Kafkaesque tale follows the travails of Budai, a linguist who steps off a plane expecting to be in Helsinki but finds himself in a sprawling and densely populated metropolis whose residents speak an unknown and unintelligible language. Budai is swept along with the crowd to a hotel, where he tries in vain to explain his predicament. With no route home apparent, Budai spends his days trying to learn what he can about the city and the language but is frustrated at every turn. The only person with whom he has any kind of relationship is Epepe, who operates the lift in his hotel. But even she can’t help when Budai’s money runs out and his situation becomes ever more desperate.

– walther, hvad er det den lange tast i midten hedder ..?
– space …
– og den yderst til venstre ..?
– outer space …

Hans intelligenskvotient var så høj, at han kunne nå dåserne på den øverste hylde. (Walther F. Lake)

Franz Kafka’s Diaries, written in German language between 1910-1923, include casual observations, details of daily life, reflections on philosophical ideas, accounts of dreams, and ideas for stories. Kafka’s diaries offer a detailed view of the writer’s thoughts and feelings, as well as some of his most famous and quotable statements. Kafka began keeping the diaries at the age of 27, as an attempt to provoke his stalled creativity, and kept writing in them until 1923, a year before his death. These diaries were in the background all through the composition of Kafka’s major works and many of them are discussed and analyzed in detail. The diaries offer an image of a profoundly depressed man, isolated from friends and family, involved in a series of failed relationships, and constantly sick. While this is certainly part of Kafka’s character it is typical for a private journal, not meant for publication, to express more of the writer’s anxieties and worries. The humor and light-heartedness sometimes expressed in Kafka’s fiction, as well as the generally positive image arising from recollections by friends and acquaintances, are missing from the diaries.

| The Kafka Project LINK | WIKIPEDIA |

Hvornår forsvinder papirbøgerne fra bibliotekerne? I princippet kunne man vel i dag overgå til udelukkende at tilbyde elektronisk udlån? Den omkostningstunge del af biblioteksdriften – lokaler og personale – kunne på den måde skæres ned til næsten ingenting og pladsen eventuelt udlejes til en 7/11? Enkelte papirspassere vil sikkert fremture, men dem kan man jo give en rabatkupon til en af bogkæderne? PS: en 7/11 vil kunne give arbejde til en del ledige bibliotekspersoner, så det ikke er nødvendigt at omskole dem mere end højst nødvendigt. (Walther F. Lake)

– trådløse hovedtelefoner er en mageløs opfindelse ..!
– ja, næst efter sko uden snørebånd …

“Things slowly curve out of sight until they are gone. Afterwards only the curve remains.” (Richard Brautigan)

“Life is a killer.” (William S. Burroughs)