David Foster Wallace - on Franz Kafka's ;funniness' and teaching that to students

"And it is this, I think, that makes Kafka's wit inaccessible to children whom our culture has trained to see jokes as entertainment and entertainment as reassurance.  It's not that students don't "get" kafka's humor, but that we've taught them to see humor as something you get--the same way we've taught them that a self is something you just have.  No wonder they cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke--that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inescapable from that horrific struggle.  That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.  It's hard to put into words up at the blackboard, believe me.  You can tell them that maybe it's good they don't "get" Kafka.  You can ask them to imagine his art as a kind of door.  To envision us readers coming up and pounding on this door, pounding and pounding, not just wanting admission but needing it, we don't know what it is but we can feel it, this total desperation to enter, pounding and pushing and kicking, etc.  That, finally, the door opens...and it opens outward: we've been inside what we wanted all along.  Das ist komisch."

http://cliffordglee.com/Site/EXSupplementalReadings_files/DFWALLACEONKAFKA.pdf

Outcasts, from The Ohlone Way

following from the seminal work of Malcolm Margolin, The Ohlone Way:

To be sure, there were a few people among the Ohlone who did not fit in--people who were felt to be greedy or aggressive.  They generally lived on the outskirts of the village or sometimes across the stream, shunned and sneered at by the rest of the people.  If a person's manners were completely unbearable--say, if he was a bully or a murderer--his family might ultimately desert him; and once deserted, the other people of the community might assault him or drive him from the village area entirely to live as an outcast.  Such a person would survive as best he could, without friends, without anyone to help him when he was sick or old, without anyone to protect him from evil shamans and malignant spirits who would instantly recognize his vulnerability.  He would lead a lonely, impoverished, and frightened life, an object of distaste to the whole tribelet and a lesson in morality to youngsters.

Such outcasts, however, were rare, and the Ohlone ethic of sharing worked to the satisfaction of almost everyone.  The poor, the weak, and the elderly were taken care of.  Even lazy or incompetent people were fed and housed--for they too had relatives.  IN fact, the way of sharing worked so well that, as several early visitors remarked, there was absolutely no robbery among the Ohlones--this despite the fact that, as la Perouse put it, "they have no other door than a truss of straw laid under the entrance when all the family are absent."  Stealing was simply unnecessary ina  land so varied and fruitful and among a people so generous.

Shraring was the underlying element in the Ohlones' economic system.  But sharing was much more than just economic.  Born into a tribelet of no more than one, two or three hundred people, the Ohlones felt very close to family and community.  They had no choice.  To be an Ohlone meant that one could not move away and start afresh somewhere else.  To be born into a certain family and bound to certain relatives and a certain triblelet--these were the major, totally inescapable facts of one's life.

Cold, by AS Byatt

a telling of the ice princess, the story 'Cold' by AS Byatt, read by myself.  organized a bit of music around and throughout it.  i admire this story a great deal for not only its proficiency and ability to describe reality, as well as the gaps between knoweledge and genuine awareness, but i also admire and love this story for its ability to be a story, to live inside the heart and emotions of the reader, or the listener in this case.

http://www.bit.do/ice-fire

enjoy!  let me know what you think!