by A. J. Jacobs
K
Kafka
There are few things more annoying than a busybody friend, the kind who thinks he knows what’s best for you and ignores your wishes.
Like Albert. Several years ago, when we were both working at Entertainment Weekly, I confided to him that I had a crush on an ad sales girl named Julie Schoenberg. But, I said, that is strictly confidential; you cannot tell a single person, especially Julie. Which he interpreted to mean: “Please, feel free to tell anyone at all, especially Julie.”
Within two hours of my confession, Julie and Albert were behind closed doors, dissecting my crush and laughing.
The only thing more annoying: when your friend turns out to be right. If Albert had honored my wishes for secrecy, I probably would never have acted on my crush. I’d still be single, lonely, and have no idea what a sconce is, much less have several in my home.
All this was on my mind as I was reading about Kafka, who had the biggest busybody friend in Western history.
First, some relevant background on Kafka. As I figured from what little I knew, Kafka had some self-esteem issues, most of which came from having a tyrant of a father. So Kafka, unable to commit himself fully to literature, got his doctorate in law and found a day job at an insurance company. While at law school, Kafka met a minor novelist named Max Brod. The two became lifelong friends.
While he was alive, Kafka halfheartedly agreed to have some of his strange stories—including Metamorphosis—published by avant-garde literary publications. But on his death from tuberculosis at the age of forty-one, full of misgivings about his work, Kafka left Brod a very clear note: Destroy all unpublished manuscripts. Which Brod interpreted to mean, “Publish all unpublished manuscripts.” He even somehow interpreted it to mean “Become Kafka’s posthumous publicist, biographer, interpreter, and archivist.” If not for Brod, we would never have known The Trial, The Castle, or Amerika, to name a few.
After reading about Kafka, I decide I’m going to call my friend Albert and tell him to burn my unfinished manuscripts when I die. He’ll know what to do.
Kama
An Indian angel who shoots love-producing flower arrows. His bow is of sugarcane, his bowstring a row of bees. I have to say, Kama with his fancy bow and arrow makes our Cupid look kind of second-rate in comparison. Cupid just flies around in a diaper shooting regular old love arrows. It is odd, though, that two cultures have these love archers. Does this say something profound about the human mind? Maybe about violence and love? The damn Britannica raises these questions in my mind but doesn’t answer them.
kappa
The strangest type of supernatural being I’ve encountered so far: a “vampirelike lecherous creature” from Japan that’s obsessed with cucumbers, resembles a green monkey with fish scales, and refuses to lower its head for fear of spilling the magic water it keeps in the holes on top of its skull. I don’t know who came up with this, but I can almost guarantee those weren’t shiitake mushrooms he was eating.
katydid
This member of the grasshopper family is named for its unique mating call, which sounds like a psychotic witness: “Katy did, Katy didn’t, Katy did, Katy didn’t.”
Kennedy, Edward M.
If Reggie Jackson’s home run spree was the only piece of history I witnessed, here we have the only person in the Encyclopaedia Britannica whom I’ve actually met. I never had the pleasure of chatting up Aristotle or Balzac, but Ted Kennedy and I have shared a firm handshake and some good times. Or a firm handshake, anyway.
I met him at my friend Douglas Kennedy’s bachelor party. Douglas is one of the many children of the late Robert Kennedy, and he was my roommate at college. Douglas had his bachelor party a few years ago at a steak house in Boston. I flew up from New York, and arrived at the restaurant an hour and a half early. When I walked inside, I found that only one other guest was there ahead of time: Senator Kennedy. Ninety minutes with Ted Kennedy. Alone.
Some might see this as a wonderful opportunity to talk to a living legend, to probe his mind about politics and history, triumph and tragedy. I saw this as a wonderful opportunity to mumble, laugh nervously, and toss out a half dozen baffling non sequiturs. I’m not very good with powerful people. If I had known he was going to be there, I’d probably have loitered at the airport T.G.I. Friday’s for ninety minutes. But there I was with Doug’s uncle, the host of the party, drinking vodka tonics.
He asked me what I did for a living. I told him I worked at Entertainment Weekly magazine. I could see from the quizzical look on his face that he wasn’t a longtime subscriber. In fact, he wasn’t a huge fan of pop culture at all. Didn’t spend a lot of time in Dawson’s Creek chat rooms. But he tried. He brought up Seagram’s Universal and how they were doing post-merger.
As for me, on the other hand, I knew about Dawson and his love triangle. But I knew squat about which conglomerate was having balance sheet woes. Dead end.
He brought up yachting. Another topic where I didn’t know my yardarm from my winch. So that sputtered out after about three minutes. I’m honestly not sure how I got through the next eighty-two minutes. I know we spent a good amount of time enjoying the sounds of the restaurant’s air conditioner and clinking silverware. But the rest is hazy. When Douglas finally walked in, I experienced something similar to what I imagine Jessica Lynch felt when those marines burst into the hospital.
The senator—who, as it turned out, was a friendly, big-hearted fellow when around those with social skills—never caught my name, but I did score a couple of points for being punctual. In fact, that became my identity: Punctual Guy. The rest of the weekend, whenever the senator saw me, he shouted, “It’s the Punctual Guy!” At the photo shoot, he suggested to the Punctual Guy that he stand over here. At the rehearsal dinner, he gave a hearty hello to the Punctual Guy.
If I met the senator now, I think I’d fare a lot better. I now know a bit about health care reform and fair housing. Though I might not bring up how the Britannica says his “somewhat raffish personal life” dimmed his presidential prospects.
Kentucky
Julie’s family’s visiting again—they love to visit, these people—and her nephew Adam will be staying the night. I’ve been assigned to inflate the air mattress for him. It’s not an easy assignment.
I’ve spent a good fifteen minutes pushing and pulling the little bicycle pump that attaches to the mattress, but I’ve made disturbingly little progress; the mattress still looks as wrinkly as a large raisin or a senator from one of the Carolinas. The problem seems to be that the air hose doesn’t properly fit over the mattress’s hole, and so the air keeps hissing out. My father-in-law, Larry, is watching the proceedings from a comfortable chair. He decides to chime in, telling me: “You got book-learning, but you got no street smarts, boy!” (He’s from the Bronx, but for some reason likes to affect an Alabama twang.)
I thank him for his insight, then go back to my pumping. My forehead is damp, I think I’ve lost a couple pounds so far, and the air keeps wheezing out of the mattress. “You should spend more time reading the instruction manual and less time on the encyclopedia, boy!”
This is not an unusual comment. Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve begun to sense the monumental amount of crap that I’m going to receive for the rest of my life (an amount somewhere between John Adams’s famous mound of manure and the debris that Hercules had to clean at the stables of King Augeas). Anytime I have a bit of trouble in the mechanical department—working a microwave, opening a lock, downloading a file at work—someone will say, “What’s the matter? That not in your fancy encyclopedia?” Anytime I don’t know the directions to Yonkers or whether there’s a gas station nearby or when the next bus leaves, someone will say, “Guess you don’t know everything after all, huh, Cliff Clavin?” Anytime I don’t know the secretary of state under Eisenhower or the capital of Kentucky, someone will say “Hey, I thought you knew everything!” (That’d be John Foster Dulles and Frankfort, by the way.)
And yes,
I did finally inflate the mattress. Well, halfway, anyway. But I tell Adam that it’s more comfortable that way, and he believes me.
Khnum
Still trying to get pregnant. The fertility god of the week is Khnum, the Egyptian diety with a human body and a ram’s head. Julie and I gave a little nod to him last night before dinner, though we don’t know how to pronounce his name. (The Britannica, sadly, doesn’t have phonetic guides.) Meanwhile, our non-Egyptian helper—Julie’s ob-gyn—has recommended I get my sperm tested. Which is why I’m at a reproductive clinic studiously avoiding eye contact with the other people—mostly women—in the waiting room.
I check in with the receptionist.
“Yes, you’re here for a collection,” she says chirpily.
I like that euphemism—a collection. So that’s what I spent so much time doing as a high schooler: collecting. I was much more dedicated to this type of collection than to my coin collection and the drink stirrer collection combined.
The nurse leads me into a room specially suited to collecting and hands me a small plastic specimen cup.
“If you need any help, feel free,” she says. She points out a basket of pornos—not Playboy or Penthouse, but the really skanky variety, the kind with sweaty men and women engaging in what the Britannica might classify as coition, really nasty types of.
Speaking of the encyclopedia, I’m relatively confident that I am the only man to ever bring a Britannica volume into this room. It’s in my computer bag, and I briefly consider taking it out.
Though it’s probably not nearly as much “help” as the magazines in the basket, the Britannica does have a surprising amount of nudity. And not just text about nudity, mind you, but pictures containing butts and breasts and other areas that would send John Ashcroft into a foaming-at-the-mouth frenzy. And not just classical nudes, but some actual black-and-white photographs of nude women. Like the one by art photographer Bill Brandt, back in the Bs, which, though fuzzy and dark, does upon close inspection in fact contain a nipple. Or the photo next to the entry for Chicago-born photographer Wynn Bullock, which shows a woman lying naked in the forest, also exposing a single nipple. That’s two nipples within a couple of hundred pages. It’s like very highbrow Hustler. If I had known about this as a teenager in my parents’ house, I could have saved myself a lot of time searching for revealing pictures in sweater catalogues. But being an adult, I decided to refrain from flipping through the K volume.
I get my collection over with quickly. Being smarter doesn’t necessarily help with this task. Though I will say that, having read about the Bible, I believe that, technically, what I did does not qualify as the sin of Onan. The sin of Onan means that you “let your seed fall to the ground.” Since mine falls into a specimen cup, I think I’m safe.
I notice the door has a little yellow smiley face with the motto “Thank you for coming.” Some angry collector has scrawled in pen next to it: “Very tacky!” I actually thought the smiley face was a nice touch. On the other hand, the layout of the fertility office could use some work. I have to drop off my specimen cup and its 3 × 108 swimmers at a nurse’s station—which requires me to do a perp walk right through the waiting room filled with women reading magazines and chatting on their cell phones.
I can’t believe how much work it is to have a baby. Or more specifically, how much work it is for me and Julie. It’s baffling to me that all our friends actually got pregnant by having a pleasant bit of sexual intercourse. And here I am, smuggling my bodily fluids around like a felon.
Kierkegaard, Søren
Man, did the world’s favorite 19th-century Danish philosopher have some problems. Self-loathing, depression, guilt, anger, father hatred. Kierkegaard was haunted by the fact that his dad—when he was a struggling tenant farmer—stood on a hill and solemnly cursed God, an act that Kierkegaard believed doomed the entire family. But that wasn’t even Kierkegaard’s biggest issue. In my opinion, that was his inability to say no.
Julie is always telling me I have this problem as well. I end up in all sorts of unpleasant scenarios because I don’t want to offend anyone. “A nude whitewater rafting trip in the Yukon in February? Sure, sounds fun.” When I was single, this translated into an inability to break up with women. I’d go out with a totally inappropriate partner for eight months too long because I couldn’t figure out how to break it off. Things got so bad, I went to see a shrink, a Freudian woman who resembled Janet Reno, to learn how to confront situations like an adult. After about a dozen sessions, I stopped going. I canceled by leaving a message on her machine at 2 A.M. and then wrote her a letter that said: “Thank you for helping me with my issues about confrontation. I think we made a lot of progress.” I was aware of the irony.
I thought about this as I read about poor Søren. In his late twenties, Kierkegaard fell in love with a young girl named Regine, and the two got engaged. But then, soon after, he had second thoughts, aware of the age gap between them, not to mention the gap in their mental states. Kierkegaard wrote in his diary, “I was a thousand years too old for her…. If I had explained things to her, I would have had to initiate her into terrible things, my relationship with my father, his melancholy, the eternal night that broods over me, my despair, lusts and excesses, which perhaps in God’s eyes were not so heinous.”
So not the perfect match, obviously. Kierkegaard decided to try to break off the engagement. Problem was, Regine wasn’t hearing it and clung to the skinny philosopher’s side. So Kierkegaard resorted to a breakup strategy worthy of sitcom: he dropped her, then staged what the Britannica calls “an elaborate show of caddishness” to preserve her reputation. Nice, but way over the top.
king’s evil
A swelling from tuberculosis, once thought to be curable by the touch of royalty. In England, Charles II is said to have touched more than ninety thousand victims. Another reason to be thankful I’m not a king in the 18th century. Because of my germ phobia, I hate shaking hands with anyone, even healthy people with no visible swellings. When I greet friends I do an air shake, which is like an air kiss, but with handshakes—it’s a trend I’m trying to start. So to sum up monarchy: Unlimited power and untold wealth—good. Fondling TB sores—bad.
kissing
Julie’s in the kitchen, chopping carrots for a vegetarian chili.
I sneak up beside her, press my nose against her cheek, and inhale deeply.
“What are you doing?”
“Just kissing you the way the Lapland people of Scandinavia kiss.”
I press my nose against her cheek again and suck in through my nostrils. She stops choppng the carrots and looks at me. It’s the look a dog might get if it kept trying to hump her leg.
“Uh, they also do this kind of kissing in southeastern India. So it’s not just the Laplanders.”
“I’m kind of busy here, honey.”
Knox, John
Knox was a 16th-century Scottish priest who wrote a work with the hard-to-forget title First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstruous Regiment of Women. Unfortunately for him, Elizabeth I came to power just as the work was published, and Knox got himself a monstrous shellacking.
First Blast is quite a title, but it’s not my favorite so far in the Britannica. My favorite title comes from a book written by Robert Fitzroy, captain of the HMS Beagle, the boat that Darwin took to the Galapagos. It’s called Narrative of the Surveying Voyages of His Majesty’s Ships Adventure and Beagle Between the Years 1826 and 1836, Describing Their Examination of the Southern Shores of South America and the Beagle’s Circumnavigation of the Globe.
I haven’t read Narrative of the Surveying Voyages of His Majesty’s Ships Adventure and Beagle Between the Years 1826 and 1836, Describing Their Examination of the Southern Shores of South Americana and the Beagle’s Circumnavigation of the Globe, but I hear it’s quite good. I wonder if my sister-in-law Alexandra’s book club might want some copies of Narrative of the—okay, I’ll stop cutting and pasting Mr. Fitzroy’s title. I spent a good mi
nute or so punching it into my computer, so I thought I’d get the most out of it. But you get the idea: It’s long. Almost as long as the entire text of the Mahabharata (the Hindu sacred book that comes in at a hundred thousand verses).
And yet, I have to like it. No cutesiness or coyness or irony or false advertising. Fitzroy doesn’t try to dazzle you with wordplay, he just tells it like it is. You know exactly what you’re getting. I’ve noticed a lot of old-time titles do this. There are a lot of Narratives of and True Stories of that go on for a paragraph summing up the book. And when I write another book, I’m going to call it Occasional Reflections on Several Subjects, which is the title used by Anglo-Irish chemist Robert Boyle for his book of moral essays. I love that one, too. It’s the best one-size-fits-all title in the history of publishing.
Kyd, Thomas
A freelance writer I know pitched me an article today. He wants to write about a fringe director who remade Raiders of the Lost Ark—but had kids playing all the starring roles. A prepubescent Indiana Jones, an eight-year-old Nazi, and so on. I file it under “Eerie Echo of the Past,” number 341. It’s the exact same concept as children’s companies, groups of children who put on plays by the likes of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson and Thomas Kyd in the 1600s. They came to be loathed by adult acting troupes, because audiences apparently preferred seeing cute miniature humans recite iambic pentameter to watching their fully grown counterparts.
Still, the article’s not right for Esquire. I send him a brief rejection e-mail. I decide to spare him the Shakespeare stuff. The poor guy is already getting his idea squashed; he probably doesn’t want a history lecture too. In general, I’m trying very hard to be more selective in what knowledge I impart. I’ve started to realize that not everybody appreciates brilliant 17th-century parallels.
