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Bounty wrote: Kafka wasn't on my mandatory reading list, but his works and concepts are sufficiently well-established that I'm genuinely surprised people haven't heard of him. Who here honestly hasn't used the word Kafkaesque?

*raises hand*
I have to admit that every time it has come up it has gone over my head. That is difficult to do given that I could find out about what it is. I just have never found a reason to want to know what kafkaesque was or if it was a person. I think there are better ways to say "a really screwed up situation involving legal and criminal matters" in plain English.

Kafkaesque implies more than a "really screwed up situation". It implies a system seemingly designed to be as opaque, byzantine, and impenetrable as is humanly possible, which appears to operate for the net benefit of no-one, but to the specific detriment of anyone caught in it.

FSTargetDrone wrote:Hopefully, whatever it is, it doesn't involve minors or some other similar horror. Though I suspect if it did involve children, that would have come out by now.

Even then, the age of consent may have been lower in Kafka's time and society than it is here and now. I don't know about 19th century Poland, but obviously many great men of history took wives much younger than themselves in what appeared to have been perfectly routine marriages that would cause a scandal today.

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When someone says that something is pornography, how do you know until you see it for yourself?

At the focus of Hawes' investigation are pictures he stumbled across in the British Library in London and the Bodleian in Oxford of the pornography to which Kafka subscribed while in his twenties. They include images of a hedgehog-style creature performing fellatio, golem-like male creatures grasping women's breasts with their claw-like hands and a picture of a baby emerging from a sliced-open leg.

The last one in particular, drawing a vagina on a person's leg and showing a baby emerging from it, sounds far more like surreal erotica than pornography to me.

Rainer Stach, a Kafka biographer, said the furore surrounding the book was an "unbelievable marketing ploy". No one had ever said Kafka was pure and chaste, but the "pornographic" pictures were "playful representations, some styled like caricatures".

Darth Wong wrote:*snip*

It's porn, Jim, but not as we know it.

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

Darth Wong wrote:The last one in particular, drawing a vagina on a person's leg and showing a baby emerging from it, sounds far more like surreal erotica than pornography to me.

While it's certainly surreal, I'm not sure I'd call it erotica. Somehow, I'm not really surprised that Franz Kafka, of all people, has some pretty weird 'porn'. I was hoping for a fairly anticlimatic reveal of fairly bog-standard women in corsets.

Incidentally, I also think it's strange thatp eople haven't heard of Franz Kafka. I had heard of him when I was fourteen, and at that age I got written into this bizarre school project set inside my own dystopic brain and my rival was that heartless adminstrator, the money-grubbing Kafka. I got the feeling that he had so much media saturation that you couldn't not hear of him. Sort of like never having heard of Lord of the Flies.

From: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/ ... 446131.ece

Dr Hawes said, noting that his American publisher did not want him to publish it at first. "These are not naughty postcards from the beach. They are undoubtedly porn, pure and simple. Some of it is quite dark, with animals committing fellatio and girl-on-girl action... It's quite unpleasant."

Dr. Hawes, you just put animals commiting fellatio in the same category as "girl-on-girl" action. What the hell?

Bounty wrote:Kafka wasn't on my mandatory reading list, but his works and concepts are sufficiently well-established that I'm genuinely surprised people haven't heard of him.

Kafka wasn't on the mandatory reading list of any class I've taken. (I attended high school and college in Southern California, if you're curious.) I know of Kafka mainly through references to him in works by other authors, like Gary Larson.

Darth Wong wrote:The last one in particular, drawing a vagina on a person's leg and showing a baby emerging from it, sounds far more like surreal erotica than pornography to me.

Hell, it sounds like standard surrealism, perhaps something Dali might make. It's twenty years before surrealism was invented, but Freud was already around and spreading his ideas, so it's not like it would be hard to find inspiration to draw some weird fucking stuff. But the popular opinion seems to be that if you make something really strange you either have to be mentally ill or on drugs. No one has ever done anything for the hell of it...