decisions, decisions ...

    When you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail
    & when you’re a shrink, every problem looks like a neurosis.

    Any first year psychiatric registrar can acquire a spurious
    reputation for perceptiveness with his obsessional patients
    when, after listening to their various compulsions & fixations,
    he forecasts: ‘And I’ll bet you find it hard to make decisions.
    Can’t stop seeing all the different possibilities, eh? Then find
    it impossible to make up your mind which one to plump for?’

    (Having observed the knife-sharp creases, the dinky little cap
    set square on the razored haircut & the bulge of gloves in
    the pocket of the freshly laundered windcheater, it’s often worth
    chancing: ‘Do you enjoy your golf? No? Thought you mightn’t.
    Chums say you take too long ever each shot? That’s a shame.')

    It’s not clear to me whether John thinks of Kafka as:
    1) an artist working with deliberation & thought.
    Or,
    2) essentially, a zombie taking down a heap of ambiguous dictation
    from his unconscious, in an act of automatic writing.

    If 1), I really cannot understand how one reading (the writer's) can
    fail to take precedence over all others - even if it were no more than
    an attempt to provoke & perplex those same readers.

    If 2), then it’s all surely just a load of obsessional golf balls.

    Scottie B.

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Received on Thu Mar 6 03:52:31 2003