#bee.fm

[thetrial]

russian riverdale

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Then one man opened his frock coat and, from a sheath on a belt that encircled his vest, drew forth a long, thin, double-edged butcher knife, held it up, and tested its sharpness in the light. Once more the nauseating courtesies began, one of them passed the knife across K. to the other, who passed it back over K. K. knew clearly now that it was his duty to seize the knife as it floated from hand to hand above him and plunge it into himself. But he didn’t do so; instead he twisted his still-free neck and looked about him. He could not rise entirely to the occasion, he could not relieve the authorities of all their work; the responsibility for this final failure lay with whoever had denied him the remnant of strength necessary to do so. His gaze fell upon the top story of the building adjoining the quarry. Like a light flicking on, the casements of a window flew open, a human figure, faint and insubstantial at that distance and height, leaned far out abruptly, and stretched both arms out even further. Who was it? A friend? A good person? Someone who cared? Someone who wanted to help? Was it just one person? Was it everyone? Was there still help? Were there objections that had been forgotten? Of course there were. Logic is no doubt unshakable, but it can’t withstand a person who wants to live. Where was the judge he’d never seen? Where was the high court he’d never reached? He raised his hands and spread out all his fingers. But the hands of one man were right at K.’s throat, while the other thrust the knife into his heart and turned it there twice. With failing sight K. saw how the men drew near his face, leaning cheek-to-cheek to observe the verdict. “Like a dog!” he said; it seemed as though the shame was to outlive him.

The Trial, Franz Kafka, trans. Breon Mitchell

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2, 4 & 14 ^_^

hiiii :)

2. Did you reread anything? What?

I didn't reread much this year (no reread of The Trial for the first time in forever) but here are a few: - Flights (Olga Tokarczuk), which I read in janfeb & again in marchapril (& then made two of my friends read it too). - I found an audiobook of Kruistocht in spijkerbroek (Thea Beckman), a childhood favourite, while wandering around the internet archive so I simply had to listen to that -- it largely holds up thought when I joined all the files into one larger audiobook I missed the last section & only found out a week after I finished it and looked up the pdf for favourite passages. I thought the open ending I accidentally assigned to it was much more compelling (though perhaps unfit for a children's book). - I also skimmed the personal classic Nooit meer slapen (Willem Frederik Hermans) throughout summer. Woobified Holden Caulfield <3 - Obligatory Le petit prince reread. Of course

4. Did you discover any new authors that you love this year?

Roberto Bolaño - he's not new to me in the sense that I was interested in reading his works last year already and only got to it now, but man. Half the time I'm reading I am pissed off at how much I am enjoying myself. I've only finished one book -The Savage Detectives- so I don't feel like I can make any sweeping statemements about his work, but I love the texture of his prose (to paraphrase something I told a friend). It is rich without feeling decadent, like a walk in spring when the first flowers are blooming, noticing everything in the world with new eyes. I also was quite impressed by Helen DeWitt, through The English Understand Wool and ~half of The Last Samurai. Really really looking forward to more from her :) Oh! I've been listening (very slowly) to Mike Davis' City of Quartz and I am captivated by it, I really want to read it physically to have a better grasp on my thoughts instead of letting them fly away as they typically do with audiobooks, and hopefully read Ecology of Fear soon

14. What books do you want to finish before the year is over?

In direct relation to the above, I am about 150 pages into Bolaño's 2666 (i.e. near the end of the part about the critics), which I took on as my big holidary reading. I would also love to finally sit down and finish The Last Samurai but I hate reading on my phone and my library loan keeps expiring before I transfer it to my ereader :'( In the realm of delusion I have been plagued by the idea of rereading The Brothers Karamazov or The Idiot, just to measure my growth since I read them last.

Thank you <3

[end of year book questions]

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WHAT THE SHROUDED RUNAWAY WAS SAYING

"Sway, go on, move. That's the only way to get away from him. He who rules the world has no power over movement and knows that our body in motion is holy, and only then can you escape him, once you've taken off. He reigns over all that is still and frozen, everything that is passive and inert.

So go, sway, walk, run, take flight, because the second you forget and stand still his massive hands will seize you and turn you into just a puppet, you'll be enveloped in his breath, stinking of smoke and fumes and the big rubbish dumps outside town. He will turn your brightly coloured soul into a tiny flat one, cut out of paper, of newspaper, and the will threaten you with fire, disease and war, he will scare you so you lose your peace of mind and cease to sleep. He will mark you and record you in his records, provide you with the documentation of your fall. He'll occupy your thoughts with unimportant things, what to buy, what to sell, where things are cheaper and where more expensive. From then on you will worry over trifles - the price of petrol and how that will affect the payments on our loans. You will live every day in pain, as though you life were a sentence. But for what crime? Committed when and by whom? You'll never know.

Once, long ago, the Tsar tried to reform the world but he was vanquished, and the world fell right into the hands of the Antichrist. God, the real one, the good one, became and exile from the world, the vessel of the divine power shattered, absorbed into the earth, disappearing into its depths. But when he spoke in a whisper from his hiding place, he was heard by one righteous man, a soldier by the name of Yefim, who paid attention to his words. In the night he threw away his rifle, took off his uniform, unwrapped his feet and slid his boots off. He stood under the sky naked, as God had made him, and then he ran into the forest, and donning an overcoat he wandered from village to village, preaching the gloomy news. Flee, get out of your homes, go, run away, for only thus will you avoid the traps of the Antichrist. Any open battle with him will be lost outright. Leave whatever you possess, give up your land and get on the road.

For anything that has a stable place in this world - every country, church, every human government, everything that has preserved a form in this hell - is at his command. Everything that is defined, that spans from here to there, that fits into a framework, is written down in registers, numbered, testified to, sworn to; everything collected, displayed, labelled. Everything that holds: houses, chairs, beds, families, earth, sowing, planting, verifying growth. Planning, awaiting the results, outlining schedules, protecting order. Rear your children, thus, since you had them without understanding, and set out on the road; bury your parents, who brought you into this world without understanding - and go. Get out of here, go far away, beyond the reach of his breath, beyond his cable and wires and antennas and waves, resist the measurements of his sensitive instruments.

Whoever pauses will be petrified, whoever stops, pinned like an insect, his heart pierced by a wooden needle, his hands and feet drilled through and pinned into the threshold and the ceiling.

This is precisely how he died, Yefim, he who rebelled. He was captured and his body nailed to the cross, immobilized like an insect, on display for human and inhuman eyes, but most of all inhuman eyes, which take the most delight in all such spectacles; hardly a surprise that they repeat them every year and celebrate, praying to the corpse.

This is why tyrants of all stripes, infernal servants, have such a deep-seated hatred for the nomads - this is why they persecute the Gypsies and the Jews and why they force all free peoples to settle, assigning the addresses that serve as our sentences.

What they want is to create a frozen order, to falsify time's passage. They want for the days to repeat themselves, unchanging, they want to build a big machine where every creature will be forced to take its place and carry out false actions. Institutions and offices, stamps, newsletters, a hierarchy, and ranks, degrees, application and rejections, passports, numbers, cards, election results, sales and amassing points, collecting, exchanging some things for others.

What they want is to pin down the world with the aid of barcodes, labelling all things, letting it be known that everything is a commodity, that this is how much it will cost you. Let this new foreign language by illegible to humans, let it be read exclusively by automatons, machines. That way by night, in their great underground shops, they can organize readings of their own barcoded poetry.

Move. Get going. Blessed is he who leaves."

(from Flights by Olga Tokarczuk, trans. Jennifer Croft)

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"In my first physiotherpay session, I was asked what my recovery goals were. I was confused this was even a question. Of course I wanted to be able to walk again, in the exact same way as before. This is how we often think of recovery: being restored to the original state, as if there had never been any change in the first place. Getting well should mean becoming the same person again. When we finally recover from a trauma, we should walk and talk and dance and laugh exactly as we did before. This definition of recovery is not unlike what is conventionally understood as a good translation of a text. If we think of ourselves as a text, each telling a unique story of our identity and our belonging, then we are all translating our own narratives whenever we migrate. Despite the displacement of language and culture, we often expect the translated text to speak as fluently as before. To do so, the translator must strive to write in an invisible hand and conceal their existence when they prchestrate the transfer of words. As american translator Lawrence Venturi describes, it is commonly believe that the best translation should appear as if it were the original, under an illusion of transparency of fluent discourse.* From word to word, we hide the fact that a conductor interveens in the meaning-exchange between our hearts and our worlds. With every step, we mask our limping, pretending that our wound doesn't hurt. As I have found out, however, concealing changes in life is very difficult. In the months following the rupture, I slowly learnt to walk again. First with the help of a pair of crutches, then with endless patience, hoping to regain my balance. Meanwhile, I struggled to adapt to a new way of speaking about vulnerabilities. As I went through the therapy process, I had to gradually translate my repertoire of ailments into English. When I first started, I spoke like a child. With a limited vocabulary around pain, I was clumsy when describing to my physiotherapist how I felt, and relied on imprecise metaphors. The branch is unwilling to bend, I would say, when expalining why I couldn't list my heel properly when I walked. Another time, out od desperation, I referred ot the nagging ache hidden in the side of my foot as the pea under the mattress. It was as if I was limping also in the English language, reminiscing the control and balance I had between my two tongues. Whatever definition we take for our recovery, one thing is for sure – it is never a linear process. At some point, when the rehabilitation exercises fely impossibly monotonous, I became overwhelmed by anexiety. What else could I possibly do to perfect my recovery and find that flawless translation that would allow me to walk in the same stride and talk with the same confidence again? Would I ever be able to restore myself to who I once was, to feel at home in my own skin like before? How do we carry on with our lives, in the aftermath of displacement and rupture? [...]

After a long convalescence, spring arrived again."

Wing Lam Tong, Speak Still: Articulating the Silence of Bilingualism (2025)

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I was tagged by Nadia @watermotif to share 9 books I aspire to read in the coming year <3 Always fun to make these kinds of lists and see if I can stick to them. Hopefully :)

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From High Tide in Tucson, Barbara Kingsolver

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14 and 17 for book asks?

hey :) thank you for asking! halfway through writing I ran out of steam to get this in a publishable form, apologies for that!

14. What books do you want to finish before the year is over?

Realistically, the books I am currently actively in the middle of (Will and Testament by Vigdis Hjorth and No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai. One must wonder why I feel like shit 24/7), but if I may take this in a fantastical direction, in order of urgency I would like to finish: Vladimir Majakovski's The Bedbug (archive.org went offline while I was reading it and took my loan with it) Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire (read half in february, another third in november and for some reason put it down and didn't pick it up again which is criminal), Valeria Luiseli's Lost Children Archive (also a feb read I couldn't finish due to circumstances), and Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives (which I started in november and stopped because I thought it would be worthwhile to have read Lost Children Archive before that). I am also dreaming of reading War & Peace in one christmas-to-new-year's sitting that will never materialise. Since I am technically also in the middle (beginning) of that one.

17. Did any books surprise you with how good they were?

This is difficult because I had some expectation of everything I picked up to be some variant of "good" (?), so I am taking this to mean 'pleasantly surprised by a book'.

I was suspicious of Y/N by Esther Yi initially because making fun of k-pop fans (or equivalent) is low-hanging fruit in my opinion. I think the book handled obsession very well and was kind to its protagonist, with some interesting insights into alienation and music-as-consumable.

I also was surprised by how much of I had with The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley -- it's relatively lighthearted compared to my usual fare and I was delighted by my ability to be delighted by it :)

Also Sacred and Terrible Air (pjõl..) by Robert Kurvitz completely blew me away. I read it for the suspected reasons and didn't expect much of the book on its own. I was capitavated by the story, the themes, the pale lore (!) and the absurdity of the book as an object in my life. I definitely don't think I could stomach it without the game to soften the blow of nihilism but thankfully we live in a world with Disco Elysium in it :)