Frigyes Karinthy in the blogosphere

In addition to the references compiled on this blog and in my English and Esperanto Karinthy bibliographies on my web site, I have come across interesting references to Frigyes Karinthy that I have not yet documented in any of these places. Here are a few of them.

Seven Questions for Ottilie Mulzet on Animalinside
(Conversational Reading, Scott Esposito's blog, June 20, 2011)

"There is one pre-war Hungarian writer I would like to mention, however: Frigyes Karinthy (1887-1938). He was primarily known as a satirist and humorist and in fact, his satiric writings were absolutely brilliant. In a series of longer short stories, though, he explored the themes of extreme psychic disintegration. Clearly he was trying to see how far he could push the Hungarian language in these stories, what happens to it when subjected to a maximum level of psychic breakdown. I see some of these experimental writings as something of a precursor to Krasznahorkai’s work within Hungarian literature, although I have to add here I don’t know if Krasznahorkai himself would consider this to be the case."

JFK, Robert Anton Wilson, Timothy Leary, Six Degrees of Separation and other High Weirdness (Overweening Generalist, November 23, 2013)

"11. Ever heard of Frigyes Karinthy? He was a Hungarian Jew who died in 1938 and probably invented the idea of Six Degrees of Separation...around 1929? (He may have been influenced by radio man Marconi.) In 1936 he had an operation for a brain tumor, and then wrote an autobiographical book Voyage Around My Skull, which came out a year after he died and was re-released in English in 2008 with an introduction by Oliver Sacks. Karinthy's still popular in Hungary, and his books are marked by science fiction ideas, comedy, play with Jonathan Swift's characters, pacifism, the themes of adolescence and the battle of the sexes. His humor is black and ironic. He espoused Esperanto. He also speculated about Artificial Intelligence long before it was invented.”

Kledon: The experience of altering meaning and significance in fine art by György Szász. Theses for a DLA dissertation, Hungarian University of Fine Art Doctoral School, 2008.

"In many works we see the multiplicity of the notion of the present or that of reality. Karinthy Frigyes (Five o’clock Closing Time, 1918): “I dreamed I was two cats and that I played with myself.”

This story has not been translated into English, to my knowledge.

Here are two more posts I just added to my bibliography:

Frigyes Karinthy, Grave and Gay, seraillon (Scott W.), December 13, 2010

A Journey Round Karinthy’s Skull, seraillon (Scott W.), December 28, 2010