“Is it my imagination, or is it getting crowded in here?”

Posted by literarypunk

In this delightful first episode of season 2 of Literary Punk, a couple of local literary imposters discuss Franz Kafka’s 1915 novella, The Metamorphosis, as the source of the modern sitcom.

Pile into the stateroom on the Punk Ship Hookturn with me and podcaster/producer, Josh Kinal, as we get intimate with fellow stowaways: Franz Kafka and his ungeheuren Ungeziefer, Marx, The Marx Brothers, 3 lodgers, a charwoman, a sobbing sister, Ben Jonson, Larry David, a chief clerk, our parents, our grandparents, and a room service guy delivering some hard-boiled eggs – amongst others.

[Image: courtesy Hookturn]

What if Macbeth had read his Marx?

Posted by literarypunk

With the Manifesto Marx “…delineated the endlessly inchoate, incessantly restless and unfinished character of modern capitalism as a phenomenon. He emphasized its inherent tendency to invent new needs and the means to satisfy them, its subversion of all inherited cultural practices and beliefs, its disregard of all boundaries, whether sacred or secular, its destabilization of every hallowed hierarchy, whether of ruler and ruled, man and woman or parent and child, its turning of everything into an object for sale.”

Gareth Stedman Jones, ‘Introduction’, The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, London: Penguin Classics, 2oo2.

…Macbeth, or machine?!