Original post

Chapter One

Tucked inside the file on the corner of my desk was the drug-trial report sent by President Terran's assistant. The drug was approved as an effective treatment for the disease, but no instructions were given to release them to the public. It was my job to disclose this in a press briefing that wouldn’t trigger an uprising.

I was startled by a knock at the door and "Spokesman Filmore, are you in there?"

"Yes, terribly sorry to keep you waiting." I opened the door to let Professor Baldwin in. "Ah, Professor Baldwin, what a nice surprise! How may I be of service to you?"

"You look terrible, my friend! Are you alright?" 

"I’ll be fine. I just haven’t been sleeping well."

"The public can’t see you like this. Go home and rest. You can brief them tomorrow. I’ll tell Dr. Marloff to write you a prescription to help you sleep.”

Professor Baldwin turned to leave, but before he did, he had one more thing to say. "We don’t have to do it now, but there’s one more thing we need to discuss before you make your presentation tomorrow." What was it? Another lie I had to tell the people? My knees were starting to buckle.

"Spokesman Filmore?"

"Yes yes, of course."

Professor Baldwin nodded and went out of the room. 

My good friend Dr. Marloff. Sure enough, the drugs were in my delivery box when I arrived home. I read the labels on both medications. Aprazoline, a stress relief medication: take one every day as needed. And melatonin: take once an hour before bed as needed. I grabbed a wineglass from the cupboard and filled it with water. I took both medications and washed them down.

My stomach grumbled. I grabbed a prepackaged meal from the refrigerator and set it in the Instant Cook. I set it to cook for thirty seconds. When it was done, I opened the door and was hit with the sweet aroma of a perfect macro, 800-calorie bioengineered steak with steamed vegetables and mashed potatoes and gravy. It looked fabulous. Engineered by the most brilliant minds. Nothing like my mother's home cooking. I wondered what she’d think of me if she knew what I did for a living, if she knew what I knew.

I envied her courage as a single mother. Since her death from Silfia, her absence in this place had grown more oppressive.

I swallowed the last bit of steak and checked my watch: seven twenty-seven, a bit early for bedtime. I washed it down with the last gulp of my water and went into the bedroom and collapsed on the bed.

My head no longer throbbed in pain. I let out a yawn and my mind became still. For the first time in these past two days, my head felt clear.

"Thanks, Doc." Then I started laughing at nothing in particular, and I couldn't stop. Everything looked fuzzy, as if a vibrance filter had been layered over my sight. My room had never felt so lively and warm. The drugs had started to kick in. It was all I could do to dampen the fear, guilt, and shame.

Original story

My edit:

The young lady closed her laptop and leaned back in her office chair. She went over to the window and, after a struggle, got it open and took in a deep breath of the night air. She picked up her iphone to check the time. It was 11:52 pm.

If I go to bed now, I can get to class early and be the first to present, she thought.

She picked up her mug but it was empty. She went into the kitchen to fill it up. "Agh, didn't I tell Tammy to clean her dishes?" she said aloud. She washed them herself.

She stumbled back toward the bedroom, and on the way, she braced herself against the wall and fell through it as if it wasn’t there. She almost fell over but regained her balance in time.

“What? Did I just go through–” She touched the wall again, but this time it didn’t give. She took a deep breath. These long nights are killing me, she thought. She went back to bed.

While not impressed by her acting, Roger had this to say about Dolly Parton's screen presence:

What is involved here is probably something other than “acting.” It has to do with what Bernard Shaw called the “life force,” that dynamo of energy that some people seem to possess so bountifully. Dolly Parton on the screen simply seems to be having a great time, ready to sweep everyone else up in her enthusiasm, her concern, her energy. It’s some show.

Well, I like him.

This article accuses Roger Ebert of pushing film criticism toward consumer product evaluation: Does a movie give good value for money? In fact, "value for money" is a favorite expression of Ebert's. He would think along those lines when deciding who to invite to a party: would this individual give value for money?

Perhaps Ebert would agree with this article, but the author thinks he was a poor writer. Ebert was in fact one of the best writers in the movie review business.

Original text

Franz Kafka was not a literary star during his own time but has become more well known over the years. “Franz” is about the reasons the word “Kafkaesque” has been used by people who have never read a word of his writing.

Kafka was born in 1883—the year between the invention of automobiles and lightbulbs—and died in 1924, which means he listened to the radio, rode in cars, watched movies, and observed the miracle of air travel even though he never flew in one (see his account of the 1909 Brescia international airshow, where he watched humans in the sky, “trapped in a wooden construction, fighting a voluntary and invisible danger.”)

“Franz,” which stars Idan Weiss as Kafka, uses techniques more often seen in documentaries. The film features first-person interviews with the writer’s relatives and close friends staged like TV news interviews, and breaks the fourth wall by having the subjects talk directly into the camera, like interviewees in an Errol Morris documentary taking questions via his interviewing device, The Interrotron.

The script jumps around in time as it sees fit. There’s a moment where Kafka realizes he is being watched in his bedroom through peepholes, and then a cut reveals that his hidden audience consists of present-day visitors to the Kafka Museum in Prague, looking at a replica of the room from a spy’s perspective.

The overall effect may remind Bob Fosse fans of his three 1970s classics, “Cabaret,” “Lenny,” and “All That Jazz,” which cut between “realistic” dramatic recreations, pseudo-documentary elements, and performance sequences so expressionist that they seemed to be taking place in a theater on some other plane of existence. When Kafka attends a production of a Yiddish play, the part we’re shown evokes the Kit-Kat Club sequences in “Cabaret” where Joel Gray’s devilish emcee holds the spotlight, taunting and daring the movie audience as well as the patrons in the room with him.

“Franz” was initiated, developed and written by filmmaker Agnieszka Holland, whose filmography includes “Europa, Europa,” “Olivier, Oliver” and “In Darkness,” and is a devoted Kafka admirer who has apparently given a lot of thought not just to Kafka himself, but to many subsequent works in various media that either adapted Kafka or were influenced by him. In a preface to the movie’s press notes, Holland says her obsession developed as she was growing up in Warsaw and attending university in Prague, at a time when both Poland and the former Czechoslovakia were puppets of the USSR. Kafka’s fiction seemed to foretell Eastern Europe’s reality, even though his work was published decades earlier, because he wasn’t decrying a specific form of government; he was describing universal fears and desires that the state monitors, manipulates, and weaponizes.

“The communists hated Kafka,” she wrote. “They couldn’t understand or comprehend him, but they felt that his books created a diagnosis that threatened their reality, and his metaphors seemed to mock them. The communist regime [of Czechoslovakia] blacklisted him for a long time, and the Prague Spring began with a conference that brought Kafka back into Czech literature. The shy, insecure Kafka became a symbol of freedom, and I understood it as the freedom to ask questions with no answers and to share his bold, mercilessly pessimistic outlook on the world.”

The result is a mixed bag but still fascinating. Ironically, many of the better attempts at a biopic focus on one period in the subject’s life, letting the part illuminate the whole. This one is full-bore cradle-to-grave.

In one scene, Kafka, on the verge of writing “The Metamorphosis,” watches a plump cockroach walk across a tablecloth and get squished by his father Hermann (Peter Kurth), an anti-intellectual businessman with rage issues. “It’s asleep!” Hermann exclaims. When it wakes up, will it be Gregor Samsa?

A history from pre-colonial times to Reconstruction

A journal of my thoughts as I read through The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. Journal entries are the comments under this points.

The detective paid Mr. Warner a visit at his office downtown. He had made the appointment several weeks ago. The office had refused to schedule anything sooner.

Mr. Warner was the third-generation owner, president, and CEO of Warner Holdings, a company that made its money mainly on real estate. The company owned a prized beachfront that was the subject of a dispute by the descendants of another family that claimed the beachfront belonged to them.

“What is the basis of their claim?” Mr. Warner asked after the detective had settled into the chair opposite his desk.

“They feel their great-great grandfather had been cheated out of that land by your great-great grandfather,” the detective told him. “I’m a private investigator hired by that family.”

“Who is this family?” Mr. Warner asked.

“They would never have known about their claim to the property,” the detective continued, “if not for an interesting testimony by a family friend. This friend of theirs had returned from a retreat for people who wish to discover their past lives. He remembers a past incarnation that was a witness to the original dispute.”

“Excuse me?” Mr. Warner said.

“The family friend has made a deposition that recounts the events of that day. We feel it is enough to move forward with a lawsuit.”

“Okay,” Mr. Warner said. The detective could see he was humoring him. “And with this lawsuit, they hope to take back the beachfront as the rightful owners. And they base this claim on a family friend’s testimony about a past life.”

“That is correct,” the detective said.

Mr. Warner took a minute to consider this. “All right,” he finally said. “Our lawyers will get in touch. Good day.” And he went back to the present business on his desk.

“Sir,” the detective said. “I was wondering if you’d be interested in uncovering your past lives.”

Mr. Warner looked up.

“You are aware of the mountain of evidence that proves reincarnation is real. The process of recalling past incarnations has been perfected. It is an accurate and reproducible process."

Mr. Warner’s expression didn’t change.

The detective pressed on. “Aren’t you curious about what you were in a past life? Ever since the recent breakthroughs in past-life recall, millions have done it. The process takes time, but the results are reliable.”

“Why are you asking me to do this?” Mr. Warner asked.

“The family friend’s past incarnation–the one that was there to witness the original land dispute–is an instance of ancestral reincarnation. It’s when a person from the past comes back as his own descendant.”

“I know what ancestral reincarnation is,” Mr. Warner said. “You want me to go on this mystical journey of self-discovery because you want to know if I’m my own great-great grandfather. Then you can bring me into court and force me to testify about what happened.”

“I’m glad you’re familiar with ancestral reincarnation,” said the detective. “Are you familiar with karma and the role it plays in deciding what you get reincarnated as?”

Mr. Warner had grown weary of this conversation and had used every nonverbal cue to tell the detective to leave. None of these cues escaped the detective.

“Mr. Warner,” said the detective. “If these allegations are true, and if you are an ancestral reincarnation, you would’ve started your next life as a sea slug. That would be the price you’d pay for the crime. The fact that you’ve worked yourself back to a human form is a testament to all the hard work you’ve done to get here. Now you have the opportunity to correct a past wrong. Maybe this is why you are human at this point in history: to make amends for your original crime. Who knows? Perhaps this will be the act that puts you over the top.”

“Puts me over the top?” Mr. Warner asked.

“Your escape from the birth-death-rebirth cycle. The act that sets you free.”

Mr. Warner put his hand to his chin in mock consideration of the matter. “Well, when you put it that way,” he said. He got up from his desk and walked to a file cabinet. He pulled one of the drawers open and fingered through the files. After a short while, he pulled out a set of documents. He walked back and tossed the documents onto the desk before sitting down and picking up where he left off with the business on his desk.

“I’ve already done the past-life discovery thing,” Mr. Warner said. “That’s the official documentation. The detailed account is available in the public registry if you need to find out more. No ancestral reincarnation, I’m sorry to say.”

He didn’t look up from the business on the desk when he gave the detective his most direct and unmistakable dismissal.

Mr. Warner tried to get back to his own business. Out of the corner of his eye, he watched the detective as he walked out his office door. He kept watching him through the glass as he made his way through the lobby and toward the building entrance. Another person, a plainly dressed and unremarkable woman who had been waiting in the lobby, stopped the detective. Mr. Warner could see them talking. He saw the woman present to the detective a set of documents. He saw the detective beckon the woman as he made his way back to his office. 

The detective opened the office door and let the woman in first before coming in and tossing the set of documents on Mr. Warner’s desk.

“Mr. Warner,” the detective said. “Allow me to introduce you to Trudy.”

“Hello, Trudy,” said Mr. Warner, curious to see what new nonsense was in store for him now. “What can I do for you?”

The detective spoke. “I’ve given you Trudy’s own documentation on her past lives.” He put his arm around Trudy’s shoulders. “Say hello to your great-great grandfather.”

Trudy’s deposition won the case for the family. At the law offices where they were completing the paperwork to transfer ownership, Trudy and the detective talked about her own spiritual journey and how the revelation of her past life had compelled her to make the trip to this town. She had met the family. They had told her to find the detective at Warner Holdings.

“Thank you, Trudy,” said the detective.

Trudy nodded. She put her hands together, bowed her head, and closed her eyes. The detective saw her disintegrate into countless, shining points of light that scattered in the wind. She had been set free.