almost something insider forum

David Gassoway reading J.M. Tyree's essay on Robert McCarren, on Robert McCarren's observation platform

In the final chapter of Franz Kafka's novel Amerika, the immigrant protagonist, Karl, joins something called "The Nature Theater of Oklahoma." The Nature Theater is a vast organization that recruits unemployed people in American towns and cities, feeding them and putting them to work in their productions, each according to their abilities and skills. Since no one is ever turned away ("everyone is welcome"), The Nature Theater is also a kind of nationwide, all-embracing charity. One feels that Karl will thrive there, even though the novel is incomplete and ends with the new recruits riding off by train into the landscape of the West. Exactly what sort of art such a massive undertaking might produce is never revealed. All we know is that The Nature Theater of Oklahoma has a splendid gilded box seat specially designed for the President of the United States. The rest is left to the imagination - the grand, perpetually unfinished possibility of America.