Happy Birthdays!

Apropos of nothing related to my films or plays, today happens to be the birthday of two of my favorite 20th century writers: the 125th for Franz Kafka (died 1924) and the 100th of M.F.K. Fisher (died 1992). Everyone knows Kafka (The Trial, The Castle, Amerika, "The Metamorphosis") but if you're not familiar with Fisher's writing you should take a browse through some of her books. She's usually described as a "food writer," but that does her a disservice, sort of like describing Herman Melville as a "nautical writer" or F. Scott Fitzgerald as a "society writer;" food and eating were not so much her subjects as her settings. She's probably best known for three books written during the Second World War - The Gastronomical Me, Consider the Oyster, and How to Cook a Wolf. These three books, and two others, were published together in a paperback compendium in the early nineties entitled The Art of Eating. If you can find a copy of that, you'll have the best of M.F.K. Fisher. You can read her Wikipedia biography here. (And just for good measure, here's Kafka's bio.) Interestingly, Fisher's long life was as eventful, robust and wide-ranging as Kafka's short life was quiet, mundane and circumscribed.