Franz Kafka's Live Journal...

Using the public domain German texts provided by the Kafka Project, Paul Keschen has taken it upon himself to translate the diaries of Franz Kafka and release each entry... in blog form.

Better yet, the translation seems to capture Kafka's own curious way of expressing the inner arrangement of that moment's scattered obsessions and manias:

28 March 1911. The painter Pollak-Karlin, his wife with two large wide front teeth tapering her large, rather flat face, Frau Hofrath Bittner, the composer’s mother, whose age so brings out her strong skeleton that at least while sitting she looks like a man: - Dr. Steiner is so very occupied with his absent students - At the lecture the dead crowd around him so. Intellectual curiosity? But do they actually need it. Apparently so.

I am really enjoying this tendency of blogging the journals of dead writers like Kafka and Samuel Pepys, or literature written in the form of dated journal entries or letters, like Dracula. I hope we see see more and more of it: blogging is a perfect way to digest literature in small portions, especially literature that might otherwise be overwhelming to contemplate reading straight through. Someone needs to blog Life of Johnson already so I can finish it.

The diaries of Franz Kafka Metameat]