When I Can't Write Fiction, I Journal Here at Bent Country

Listening to the Braves try to take first place from the miserable Mets. First game in about four or so the Baby Braves didn't get on the scoreboard in the first inning. Doesn't bode well, I'd say. Thing is, even if we drop this one we will win tomorrow and take the series because that's what we've been doing so far this year.

I can't even figure out where or how to get the team on television without buying MLB Network for a year for a triple digit figure. Not doing that. So I listen to them on the radio, an Atlanta station, thank god. There's a simple and nice lull a baseball game on the radio can put you in. Sometimes I'm not listening to the details. Instead I'm kind of zoned out by the rhythm. This game is going to be slow, lots of strikes, lots of pop-ups. I can already tell.

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Finished reading Kafka's The Castle. Didn't much like it, other than the comedy relief offered by the two assistant characters. Pretty much hated the narrator "K." who we all know is always a kind of Kafka placed into a fictional world to face fictional problems that perfectly reflected his own perceived horrors, mostly at home and with women (or his self-imposed lack of them). I'm not a fan of Kafka the Man. I love his short fiction and I loved In the Penal Colony, and I'm getting ready to finally put The Metamorphosis under my belt this year, but Kafka the Man was a weak mound of concentrated complaint and whining. I keep reading him because when he's on he really really on. But when he's The Castle, it's like reading a book that gets twenty pages longer every time you finish reading ten pages. Half the book (The Castle) were these massive chunks of dialogue. It almost made me wonder (considering the novel was published unfinished by Kafka's brother Robert) whether or not ol' Franz didn't have a dialogue first, exposition second kind of drafting setup. I don't know. I can't imagine he thought half a novel of nothing but lengthy chunks of dialogue that sounded like the most formal speech ever given in the history of the world was a good literary technique. I mean, I think the guy had a incredibly weak constitution, but I know he was a literary genius.

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Reread a great essay by novelist and friend David Joy today. READ IT HERE. I will always let David speak for himself.

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Still no score in the Braves game. Lots of strikes. Later you all.

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