Tag: Kafka

Writer’s Desk: Challenge Yourself

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books, WritingLeave a comment
(Orson Welles, 1964, by Nicolas Tikhomiroff)

Orson Welles spent most of his career scrapping for money, fighting with producers, and generally trying to balance fifteen spinning plates while doing a magic card trick at the same time. It was an exhausting way to make art.

Still, when indie filmmaker Henry Jaglom was complaining to him one time about not having the time or money to finish a movie the way he wanted, Welles had a tart response:

The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.

This doesn’t mean you should intentionally impoverish yourself to invent challenges. But Welles has a point in that a piece of work can benefit from the creator having something to push against. Set yourself some difficult parameters (it must be this long, I must finish it by this date, if I don’t sell it by this point then I will move on to something else, etc.). The discipline required in overcoming even minor obstacles can give you practice in overcoming the challenges presented by your writing.

Don’t get too comfortable, in other words. Push yourself.

Writer’s Desk: Read in Cafes

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books, WritingLeave a comment

You would think that the likes of Gabriel Garcia Marquez (born March 6, 1927) was one of those people fated to be a writer. How else to explain his golden pen? But no, as a young man in the 1940s, he was just another Columbian law student. Fortunately for the rest of us, though, he decided to waste his free time on a different pursuit: reading.

From “How I Became a Writer“:

On free afternoons, instead of working to support myself, I read either in my room or in the cafés that permitted it. The books I read I obtained by chance and luck, and they depended more on chance than on any luck of mine, because the friends who could afford to buy them lent them to me for such limited periods that I stayed awake for nights on end in order to return them on time…

He discovered Graham Greene, Aldous Huxley, and many other greats. Then came Kafka. And a challenge:

When I finished reading “The Metamorphosis,” I felt an irresistible longing to live in that alien paradise. The new day found me at the portable typewriter that Domingo Manuel Vega had lent me, trying to write something that would resemble Kafka’s tale of a poor bureaucrat turned into an enormous cockroach. In the days that followed I did not go to the university for fear the spell would be broken, and I continued, sweating drops of envy, until Eduardo Zalamea Borda published in his pages a disconsolate article lamenting the lack of memorable names among the new generation of Colombian writers, and the fact that he could detect nothing in the future that might remedy the situation. I do not know with what right I felt challenged, in the name of my generation, by the provocation in that piece, but I took up the story again in an attempt to prove him wrong…

New in Film: ‘The Double’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - Festivals, Film - NewLeave a comment

Jesse Eisenberg and Mia Wasikowska in 'The Double' (image courtesy of Magnolia Pictures)
Jesse Eisenberg and Mia Wasikowska in ‘The Double’ (image courtesy of Magnolia Pictures)

In Dostoyevsky’s 1846 novel The Double, a St. Petersburg bureaucrat encounters an identical version of himself, who proceeds to take over his life. In Richard Ayoade’s hallucinogenic, picaresque adaptation, Jesse Eisenberg plays both halves of the office-drone doppleganger—one an ignored sad sack who can’t get the girl and the other a life-of-the-party predator who can get any girl. Frustration results.

The Double is playing now in limited release. My review is at Film Racket:

If Wes Anderson immersed himself in Orwell, Kafka, and other high priests of chilly, bureaucratic horror, the result might look something like Richard Ayoade’s metaphysical nightmare The Double. That would never happen, of course, as Anderson is an optimist and fabulist who believes in the happy ending, warted though it might be. Ayoade is a colder fish, as he showed in his first film, Submarine, which had a little too much fun reveling in its young protagonist’s studied quirk for its own sake. But that directorial remove, coupled with a lack of desire to pretend that a character’s suffering in any way automatically creates nobility, helps make Avi Korine’s adaptation of the Dostoyevsky novella into a bracing, darkly crystalline film that isn’t easily shaken off. If there were ever such a thing as the nightmare comedy, this is it…

You can see the trailer here: