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.

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.

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.

"Lying Awake," by Mark Salzman. Knopf. 192 pages. $21. It is hard to say where the power of this short, excellent and profound book comes from, but I think the explanation is to be found in an essay that Albert Camus wrote about Franz Kafka. Camus maintained that the reason Kafka's characters are so powerful is that they accept their unexpected and often bizarre circumstances as being perfectly ordinary. For instance, when Greogor Samsa wakes up to find that he has been transformed into an enormous cockroach, he doesn't say, "My god, look at me, what a monster, look at these tobacco colored plates on my chest, my hairy legs.

The Sun's question of the month got me thinking about how to continue the momentum of learning that my granddaughter has developed in her kindergarten class, where she was very fortunate to have two dedicated teachers who challenged and motivated her class to read and learn. We want to continue to enhance her abilities and help her prepare for the first grade. Our plan is to follow the lead of her teachers and do the following. First, obtain a list of words that were required in kindergarten and review them.

''Why was Jesus born in a manger?''''Mary and Joseph had an HMO.''-- American folk wisdom of the 1990s. ALL RIGHT, STEVE FORBES, Jack Kemp and the rest of you. You win. You can have your flat tax, if -- if -- you give people like me something for it. That something is a single-payer health-care system.You say the flat tax will let us concentrate on doing productive work or spending time with our families instead of keeping records and figuring out ways to outwit the system. It sounds fine.

Connoisseurs of the surreal, the grotesque and the absurd are hereby urged to repair to the Orpheum in Fells Point for a tangy repast of unimaginable delight. Others are advised to steer clear; this dish is for the cognoscenti.The movie is "Faust," by the Czech surrealist animator Jan Svankmajer, as much out of Kafka as out of Goethe and Marlowe. It reiterates the classic story of the necromancer who makes a deal with His Satanic Majesty in order to enjoy sublime power and sensation on Earth but who must, in the end, give the devil his due.However, this "Faust" is a mad mixture of mediums, yielding images largely unseen anywhere outside the most recondite animation emporiums.

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.

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.

Cookbook author Barbara Kafka has a strong sense of taste, a dry wit and a passion for unpretentious food.She wants Americans to cook. She wants us to loosen up in the kitchen, constantly taste things, invite friends in for a simple meal and relax over a glass of wine.She hopes we'll whisk our shopping carts past the vast array of frozen foods and reach for a fresh plump chicken. To her, "The biggest social tragedy in America today is that families don't eat dinner together."Always quick to voice an opinion, Ms. Kafka is one of today's most knowledgeable food and wine writers.