Kafka

From the beginning of this girls soccer season, most coaches in the Interscholastic Athletic Association of Maryland pegged the Institute of Notre Dame as an up-and-comer in the A Conference. Yesterday, the Indians proved they are already here. With a 2-0 victory at No. 2 McDonogh, the No. 8 Indians cracked what, for the past few years, has been a four-team race atop the A Conference with St. Mary's, Notre Dame Prep, McDonogh and John Carroll. The win, on goals from Jen Moberly and Stephanie Petrides, was IND's first over McDonogh since 1996.

MEXICO CITY -- They call it "The Book of the Dead" because so many of its characters have died. It is the Mexico City telephone directory."You might say the directory is symbolic of a telephone system designed by Franz Kafka," says Hector Borbolla, an executive with IBCON, a company that has made a fortune publishing specialized phone books with real listings and living people.Indeed, Miguel Kafka, a Mexico City accountant who is a distant relative of the surrealist Czech author, says: "Not only are so many people in the phone book dead but the phone numbers are dead, too."

theater 'The Seafarer': Irish playwright Conor McPherson is the king of bleak humor. A slate of the area's finest actors (Edward Gero, Floyd King and Billy Meleady) combine forces for The Seafarer, a tale of four friends - one blind and the rest blind drunk - who play a climactic game of poker with the devil. Through Feb. 22 at Studio Theatre, 1501 14th St. N.W., Washington. Showtimes vary. Tickets are $34-$61. Call 202-332-3300 or go to studiotheatre.org. Mary Carole McCauley art 'So Many Organs': Photographer Liz Donadio, painter Ryan Syrell and multimedia artist Dina Kelberman present their work in So Many Organs, an exhibit that opens tomorrow and runs through Feb. 13 at Current Gallery, 30 S. Calvert St. There's a reception with the artists 7 p.m.-10 p.m. Jan. 30. Go to currentspace.

Generally speaking, I do not think highly of book burning, but there's a time and place for everything. Someone ought to break into Woody Allen's West Side co-op and pull out all his treasured volumes of Kafka, Dostoyevsky, Kierkegaard, Sartre and Schulz, take them out on Amsterdam avenue and set them alight: it would be a true bonfire of the vanities.It's too late to do "Shadows and Fog" any good, alas. It was ruined at the instant of conceptualization: a "pastiche" of existential ideas as beamed through a prism of German impressionist film stylings and set to quasi-life with a bunch of show-biz celebs, occasionally amusing but even at 86 minutes, a very long trip to nowhere.

Prague. -- On the second floor of this very new and very Western hotel, there is a room named inauspiciously for this city's most famous citizen: Franz Kafka.Coming upon this room by surprise one morning, I try to imagine Gregor Samsa, the author's man-turned-beetle, lurking behind the sleek doorway. But this Kafka Room holds only the requisite tables and chairs for the people who come here now to take meetings and do business.It's been three years since ''The Velvet Revolution'' separated .. Czechoslovakia from the Soviet Empire, six months since ''The Velvet Divorce'' that split Czechs from Slovaks.

We are typing, typing, typing,smuggling our words onto the backsof your furthermores and enclosed-you-will-finds.We draw fangson the happy facesof your Post-it notes,stir powdered laxativesinto your coffee creamers,hurl executive bathroom keysthrough the air vents of your waiting rooms.We will blame visiting children.Some of us drive black'69 VW vans and liketo curb our rusted fendersinto your corporate parking spaces.We wear sunglasses at our desks,make secret listsof Naugahyde jokes,and snickerat all the matching teak veneerwhile lodgingmint toothpicksinto their pressboard spines.

When Franz Kafka the writer was a young man, he contracted tuberculosis. On days when he felt well enough, he went for a walk in a nearby park. On one of those days, when he was sitting on a bench and enjoying the sunshine, he noticed a mother and daughter on the next bench over. The child was crying as only a heart freshly broken can cry. Gail Rosen begins this tale in a small church meeting room on a day not long before Halloween, when the late afternoon light cast shadows the color of brewed tea. There is food on the table, cookies and trail mix, and a cranberry-red beverage of some kind, but no one bothers to eat. A lot of people are piled into that little room, jammed thigh to thigh on the worn couches, or inadequately contained by armless folding chairs.

Generally speaking, I do not think highly of book burning, but there's a time and place for everything. Someone ought to break into Woody Allen's West Side co-op and pull out all his treasured volumes of Kafka, Dostoyevsky, Kierkegaard, Sartre and Schulz, take them out on Amsterdam Avenue and set them alight: it would be a true bonfire of the vanities.It's too late to do "Shadows and Fog" any good, alas. It was ruined at the instant of conceptualization: a "pastiche" of existential ideas as beamed through a prism of German impressionist film stylings and set to quasi-life with a bunch of show-biz celebs, occasionally amusing but even at 86 minutes, a very long trip to nowhere.

Andy Warhol may be one of the great immortals of modern art, but not because of his penetrating insight into the depths of the human soul. You can tell that by looking at his portraits. They are not his best work.Nevertheless, Warhol is so astonishingly famous that any mention of his name arouses curiosity. So the Jewish Community Center's current "Andy Warhol: Ten Portraits of Jews of the 20th Century" may be packing 'em in. And it has some virtues.In the 1980s, Warhol and New York art dealer Ronald Feldman hatched the idea for a series of silkscreen portraits of Jewish leaders of various professions.

Schopenhauer's Telescope, by Gerard Donovan. Counterpoint. 301 pages. $25. Buried inside this windy and at times irritating meditation on human barbarity are the makings of a slender, elegant novel about two men caught up in a brutal war. One man is the village baker, the other a history teacher, and as the book opens the baker is marched into a wintry pasture to dig a hole -- a grave, it would seem, but for whom, and how many? As this mystery deepens, so does the baker, shoveling himself further into the earth while the teacher alternately hectors and commiserates from a commanding perch at the rim. It is a neat bit of misdirection, which swings our sympathies behind the baker for most of the book.