Author: [[Nick Roberts]] --- # November it began with an idea from Louis Prang “the father of Santa Claus”                                          and November the month that always reminds me of Kafka and of Prague— an author I haven’t read in years and a city I’ve never been to when he was nearly 40 Kafka wrote a letter to his father 45 pages long in which he blames his father for many things, including and especially his inability to marry or find fulfillment in erotic love “Will they also lower me into my grave, after a life made happy through their care?” —Franz on May 6, 1914 two months before the war would aggravate both his love and his tuberculosis meanwhile Prang, another father late of Roxbury lay quiet in a Los Angeles grave light-maker return to light and Franz, another deutschophone would be in ten years’ time that was the decade the master of the house and the angel in the house slew eachother # Insurance we’re all poor, so poor and none of us want to heave guns and go to war. It’s supposed to snow tomorrow night and I don’t know if I’ll be sleeping in my bed or in Jack’s either way I’ll have to do laundry Monday morning I’ve been invited to a party I don’t want to go to and I bought tickets for a play I don’t want to attend Kafka apparently had more success with women than he lets on, and he might’ve even had a son by a woman named Grete (according to Brod) little wonder— he was tall and slender and had that slightly bored, slightly frightened look writers have peace exists so well in the heart but not outside it— the same goes for love and pregnancy everyone’s getting married everyone’s having kids and noone has insurance there’s an evergreen outside my window (the righthand one) I wonder how long it’s been growing for and how it has left to grow “For my bonnie laddie’s lang, lang a-growing” I always used to think of Conrad with that song his little head ivied # Throat 1919 was the year everything happened (really the Year the World Split in Two, not 1922) that year Arnold Rothstein conspired with Lefty Williams and Shoeless Joe to fix the World Series forever and with Abe Attell brought down the credibility of MLB for decades tallbearing Franz sat behind his desk and wrote a writer’s letter the pipes are making an annoying sound just now the phone rings and I almost don’t pick it up Franz was a tall man surrounded by small men who were bigger than him or was he just extremely lucky? there exists no bird that can match it “Am entirely empty and insensible, the passing trolley has more living feeling.” —Franz on 11/20/1913 after seeing “Lolotte” and “The Accident on the Dock” the way you feel empty after you watch certain movies or make really good love to somebody who made you breakfast don’t you ever wish you could reach up sometimes and sockpunch the sad moon? like when people are kind to me after I’ve done wrong I feel outrageously sad when writing letters to Felice or any woman in Prague, Franz regretted the capacity to love as if a single man’s regret could redux the entire history of human loving (loving distinct from sensation) This post says of Chatterton: “fatherless and raised in poverty” as if anyone could be fatherless one half of the necessary genius, I think the trope of the beautiful poet writing ugly verse and the ugly poet, therefore, must write beautiful verse I wonder how much time I spend listening to other people’s voices the clammer is impossible to fully reconstruct here and now (oh christ and oh camus how can I imagine Sisyphus happy when I can’t even imagine myself happy?) Christ, Kafka, and Camus all had the same problem: too much to say and too few to listen though Christ won out in the end 2.6 billion of his name and probably growing if not in the parish of the Brighton Allston Congregational Church then in some All a guess. Throw something in the air and die. Like small and very delicate birds waiting for a hint of catechism or a choice unchoiced. Heaven and its cabal are the first star-crossed lovers to exist on this plane or in any other of equal magnitude the priest puts his hand on me and says “you weren’t meant to be a priest” or any man of the cloth I hate it when I try to talk to someone or ask a question and phlegm catches my words in my throat. Nothing aggravates me more than being misconstrued. Nothing less charitable than the strangling of human communication by itself like at the end of “The Hunger Artist” the impresario asks “Du hungerst noch immer?” and so his grim art continues