Posts Tagged ‘Marx’

Man becomes a shadow of his former self. However I discover it works both ways.

Sir Isaac Newton’s 2^nd Law of Motion memorialized the truth that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. And as in the scientific world, so too in the literary world. This law was never more operable than it was in reference to Franz Kafka’s novella Metamorphosis in which an ordinary man awakens one morning to find himself in the body of an insect. Its authorship by the tortured Mr. Kafka spontaneously generated an equal and opposite novella in a parallel literary universe titled Morphometasis in which an ordinary insect awakens one morning in the body of a man. And having recently discovered this heretofore unknown novella while NyQuil-binging at a book fair in Rutland, VT, I thought it only fitting that I introduce it to a gullible society and contrast the novella’s salient plot points with those of the more well-known Metamorphosis.
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Russian Birthmark

I always had a strange fascination with the old Soviet Empire. Being born into the Cold War era, I just accepted its’ peril as something burned into my existence. It was always there operating in the background of my early life like Bonanza or Spaghetti O’s. Even though I was only 7, I was mystified on how something as dispiriting and toxic as Communism could take root in the bosom of Mother Russia. And as a disbelieving adolescent I followed Soviet events with prodigious avidity – not an easy thing for a 7 year old to do. Their culture seemed so poisonous; like being on chemotherapy all the time, but with nothing to cure. Things were so bleak in the Soviet Union that Russian children didn’t wish they were Oscar-Mayer wieners. Even the Soviet Keebler Elves were banished to a Siberian Gulag for putting too much sand in one of Stalin’s Pecan Sandies.  Read the rest of this entry »