…The work he undertook at the Institute, combining as it did absurdity with tragedy, degradation, and humble passivity, had a tremendous impact on his writing as well. He wrote in a letter to Max Brod:
In my four districts—apart from all my other jobs—people fall off the scaffolds as if they were drunk, or fall into the machines, all the beams topple, all embankments give way, all ladders slide, whatever people carry up falls down, whatever they hand down they stumble over. And I have a headache from all these girls in porcelain factories who incessantly throw themselves down the stairs with mounds of dishware. This world, where absolutely nothing can go right, is surely representative to a degree of those universes into which his characters are placed. The maze of officials, clerks, and other assorted bureaucratic trappings of the Institute have long been viewed as a direct inspiration for the stagnancy of law and government in The Trial and The Castle….
---Painter Lionel S. Reiss’ 1946 watercolor, “Going Home (Near Bloomingdale’s and the 59th Street Elevated),” captures a crowd of mothers, shop girls, laborers, and businessmen ascending the packed staircase.--- Read More:https://ephemeralnewyork.wordpress.com/tag/paintings-nyc-1946/
…This malaise was hardly confined to the insurance industry. The inefficiencies that confronted Kafka were only one part of an endemically problematic apparatus, the confluence of civil law and administrative bureaucracy. At this time, “the German conception of the law was not very different from the French: the law is about administrative rules. It [was] general and impersonal.” In the face of this sprawling mechanism the people would walk humbly to the gates for their remedies. Kafka noted in a conversation with Brod the degrading passivity imbued in the workers by this overarching and powerful nemesis:…
---by a woman artist I'd never heard of until three years ago. Elizabeth Sparhawk-Jones (1885-1968) studied at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (where Thomas Eakins taught). She was considered a prodigy, with brushwork that rivaled the best American artists of her time. She won a number of awards, was selling her works at very high prices, then disappeared into a mental institution for 20 years beginning in 1933. --- Read More:http://leisacorbettartist.blogspot.com/
…“How modest these men are. They come to us and beg. Instead of storming the Institute and smashing it to pieces they come and beg.” The same mentality can be seen in certain of Kafka’s characters, most notably the man from the country in “Before the Law,” who sits patiently before the gates of the Law, waiting for permission to enter, when only a superficial denial keeps him from the interior. Read More:http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~idjlaw/PDF/17-1/17-1%20Glen.pdf
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