Join us on Fri­day at a lit­tle after 12 noon or 4pm Pacif­ic time / 8pm or mid­night in the UK,  for anoth­er episode in the land­mark radio dra­ma series The Black Mass, cre­at­ed by the late Erik Bauers­feld and his col­leagues at the Paci­fi­ca radio sta­tion KPFA in Berke­ley, Cal­i­for­nia, over fifty years ago. In 30 chill­ing tales of mys­tery, imag­i­na­tion and the human mind, The Black Mass brings you some of literature’s most haunt­ing sto­ries, by mas­ters of the craft — many of whom are best-known in oth­er fields. Our thanks as always to John Whit­ing, pro­duc­er of many of these record­ings, and of course to Erik Bauers­feld him­self.

Note that the episode will not start until the track play­ing at the top of the hour has fin­ished, so the actu­al start time of the episode will be a few min­utes after the hour.

20 August: A Country Doctor by Franz Kafka

The Doc­tor: Erik Bauersfeld
The Patient: Lar­ry Madin
Rose: Pat Franklyn
The Groom: Bernard Mayes

Tech­ni­cal Pro­duc­tion by: John Whiting
Music Com­posed and Per­formed by: Peter Winkler
Adapt­ed and Pro­duced by: Erik Bauersfeld

A doctor’s night­ly atten­dance on a dying boy who can­not, or will not, be saved.

“A Coun­try Doc­tor” (Ger­man: “Ein Lan­darzt”) is a short sto­ry writ­ten in 1917. It was first pub­lished in the col­lec­tion of short sto­ries of the same title. A coun­try doc­tor makes an emer­gency vis­it to a sick patient on a win­ter night. The doc­tor faces absurd, sur­re­al predica­ments that pull him along and final­ly doom him.

Length: 24:13

Wikipedia says of Franz Kafka:
Franz Kaf­ka (3 July 1883 – 3 June 1924) was a Ger­man-speak­ing Bohemi­an nov­el­ist and short-sto­ry writer, wide­ly regard­ed as one of the major fig­ures of 20th-cen­tu­ry lit­er­a­ture. His work fus­es ele­ments of real­ism and the fan­tas­tic. It typ­i­cal­ly fea­tures iso­lat­ed pro­tag­o­nists fac­ing bizarre or sur­re­al­is­tic predica­ments and incom­pre­hen­si­ble socio-bureau­crat­ic pow­ers. It has been inter­pret­ed as explor­ing themes of alien­ation, exis­ten­tial anx­i­ety, guilt, and absur­di­ty. His best known works include “Die Ver­wand­lung” (“The Meta­mor­pho­sis”), Der Process (The Tri­al), and Das Schloss (The Cas­tle). The term Kafkaesque has entered Eng­lish to describe sit­u­a­tions like those found in his writing.

The Black Mass art­work was cre­at­ed by Ter­ry Lightfoot.