I couldn't find the food I liked

One of my favorite Kafka stories is A Hunger Artist. I say "favorite" but really I mean one that I can sort of wrap my head around and speculate about what that particular allegory might mean, plus it's also a fun conversation with artists about the nature of performance and what not. In the story, the narrator talks about how the standard duration of a fast for a hunger artist is 40 days.

DID YOU KNOW that David Blaine, weird magician illusionist fellow, lived in a glass box suspended over the thames with no food and only water for 44 days? Cuz he DID. He says of that particular stunt that it was one of the hardest things he's ever done but one of the most beautiful.

I mention this for a few reasons.

1) While he probably wasn't doing it to live out a Kafka story (next he'll wake up a bug!) I think it's pretty cool to see something Kafka wrote about actually happen to a certain degree.

2) I just watched D-Blaine's TED talk where he mainly discusses preparing for his 17 minute breath holding extravaganza and he's totally a cool guy. He's super low key and talks about his life, like purging your body of CO2 and freezing yourself in a block of ice, like its no big thing. I kind of just want to be his bud.

3) A Hunger Artist really holds a special place in my heart. This past summer I had the kids in my acting class act out the story anywhere on camp except the theater and their performances were incredibly brilliant for totally different reasons. Like the one group that had the performer and the audiance cram into a tiny hallway and while we were inches away from the performer, the director would be behind everyone shoving us forward. Love it.

Anyhoo, cool tricks.