Hey, it's Major. Today's episode is courtesy of the poet Jason Schneiderman.

Don't worry, I'll return to your feeds on June 12th.

I am Jason Schneiderman, and this is The Slowdown.

In my freshman year of college, I dated someone whose name was so similar to mine that whenever

I saw his email address, I thought it was my email address. I get messages from him or see

his responses on forums and for a moment, I wouldn't be able to remember when I wrote the words I

was reading before remembering that I hadn't written them at all. I would have to remind myself

that I am in fact an entirely different person, although one with a very similar email address.

So when I decided it was time for personal email not associated with the University of Maryland,

I became Kafka Boy at Yahoo.com. The address announced my love of Czech writer Franz Kafka

with what I hoped was a touch of superhero glamour, ironic, of course. But more importantly,

I was eager to avoid the identity vertigo of thinking I was someone else I couldn't remember

having been. Of course, in telling the story now, it seems not just counterintuitive,

but downright perverse to use someone else's name so that I could be sure I was me.

It also makes me think about how my favorite thing about Kafka is the way in which his characters

don't feel like the protagonists in their own stories. Over and over again, main characters

are forced to see themselves from the outside to adopt someone else's judgment in order to

survive or in order to perish while assuring the survival of someone else who seems more important.

One of the things I love about Kafka is that while we think of him as being both a tragic figure

and a depressing writer, during his life, he was considered quite funny. There are accounts of

people falling out of their chairs with laughter when he read the metamorphosis out loud.

In today's poem, Anne Carson engages Franz Kafka, but not directly. The story takes place in 1942,

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