Kafka's Porn Stash

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

No wonder "K" buckled so fast. . . .
 -------------- Original message ----------------------
From: "David Morris" <fqmorris at gmail.com>
> http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article4
> 446131.ece
> 
> Excavating Kafka, a new book by James Hawes, includes (for the first
> time) material gleaned from Kafka's hardcore porn stash, booklets that
> were published by the same publisher who published Kafka's own work.
> 
> Even today, the pornography would be "on the top shelf", 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."
> 
> "Academics have pretended it did not exist," Dr Hawes said. "The Kafka
> industry doesn't want to know such things about its idol."
> 
> He added: "Perhaps Kafka's biographers simply don't like the idea that
> their literary idol was helped out in this... way in the vital early
> stages of his career... Of the world's authors, only Shakespeare
> generates more PhDs, more biographies, more coffee-table books...
> Everything Kafka wrote, every postcard he ever sent, every page of his
> diary... is regarded as a potential Ark of the Covenant... Yet no-one
> has ever shown his readers Kafka's porn."