Kafka's MAGIC MOUNTAIN?!?
2002.09.23 11:47
At the very end of the video interview of Peter Eisenman in conjunction with the latest Venice Biennale, the architect makes reference to "Kafka's Magic Mountain," as in hopefully the architect's project of a City Of Culture at Santiago de Compostela will find a happy artistic commonality with Kafka's Magic Mountain.
Maybe Eisenman is knowledgeable of some manuscript that Kafka himself destroyed (as Kafka did destroy some of his own manuscripts), but otherwise it was Thomas Mann that wrote The Magic Mountain.
Yes, let's hear it for [some] contemporary architecture and [it's knowledge of] culture!
Thomas Mann happens to be one of my few favorite authors. I've read The Magic Mountain twice, and boy do I get mad at the whole climax being in French, a language I can't read! Joseph And His Brother had a profound effect on me and my thinking. It took just over a year for me to read, and I felt very fortunate to begin reading the third book "Joseph in Egypt" while on my first trip to LA, September 1982--their was an uncanny commonality between both 'events'. The Holy Sinner is a really twisted gem. And something really nice happened in Savannah, Summer 1979, after I read aloud some passages from Death In Venice.
I'd love to reenact all my reading of Mann, yet right now I'd really like to reenact a specific interview by ending it with reference to "Eisenman's Death In Venice."
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