inkbluesky

Fame and secrecy. If one achieved some fame in life on purpose or by accident the best you can hope for, if you’re concerned about personal matters not being grist for the gossip mill, is that they remain secret until you die. Or can’t a guy keep some naughty pictures in a drawer anymore without the whole world know’n bout it, Porn claims outrage German Kafka scholars

“Hawes has given us a look through the keyhole of a Kafka with his trousers down … but to call the illustrated magazines he subscribed to as hardcore porn, is like comparing a poem by Heinrich Heine with an advertising slogan for McDonald’s,” wrote Anjana Shrivastava, a Kafka researcher on Spiegel Online, calling Hawes a “prude”. She said he had made himself a “preacher of hate” in the world of Kafka scholars.

This might be much ado about not much, Franz Kafka (3 July 1883 – 3 June 1924) did live in the early years of photography, but hardly in the age of slick graphic magazines or mail order DVDs for that matter. Hawes states that the images were drawings with a caricature-like styling – “golem-like male creatures grasping women’s breasts.” Sounds more like crude humor then porn. Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love, c. 1513-1514 would probably be closer to what modern audiences would consider a predecessor to modern magazine pin-ups and much of Titian’s work was commissioned by the church or royal officials. The outrage generated by Hawes seems more a case of a few scholars with some odd and misplaced feelings of over reactive paternalism. My impression of scholarship was that one looked for the truth. Since there have been a few good biographies of Kafka and Hawes had not seen Kafka’s little collection mentioned before or legitimate questions raised about how these caricatures may have related to his work, Hawes was correct in bringing them to the public’s attention. The craziest accusation to come out of this; pictures plus inclusion in book equals the new antisemitism.

station guards.

What’s in Air Fresheners – Unlisted Ingredients

Products for making indoor air smell fresh or laundry smell clean may include volatile chemical compounds technically considered to be pollutants.

Other then an aversion to polyester clothing the only allergy i have is swollen sinuses when i get too close to one of those air freshener gadgets. And this is from someone that has been through organic chemistry labs.

Jackson Browne sues McCain over song use

“Not only have Senator McCain and his agents plainly infringed Mr. Browne’s copyright in ‘Running on Empty,’ but the federal courts have long held that the unauthorized use of a famous singer’s voice in a commercial constitutes a false endorsement…

Not respecting somone’s property rights. Doesn’t that attitude come from a sense of entitlement.

Some of Kafka’s work has fallen into the public domain. In this excerpt from Unhappiness (English transl. Claudia Furrer) he manages to make the everyday scampering of a child sound eerie,

When it had already become unbearable – by an evening in November – and I was running along over the narrow carpet in my room as on a racetrack, frightened by the sight of the lights in the street turned around again and was given a new goal in the depths of the room, at the bottom of the mirror, and I cried out, just to hear the scream which is answered by nothing, and from which nothing takes the strength of the scream, which therefore rises up, without any counterpoise, and cannot cease even when it grows silent; a door was opened in the wall so hastily, since haste was indeed necessary, and even the wagon-horses down on the pavement reared, like crazed horses in a battle, their throats exposed.

As a small ghost, a child scurried out of the completely dark corridor, in which the lamp was not yet burning, and stood still on his toes, on an imperceptibly shaking floorboard. Immediately blinded by the twilight of the room he wanted to hide his face in his hands, but calmed down unexpectedly with a look at the window, before whose cross-bar the rising haze from the streetlights finally kept low under the darkness. With the right elbow he supported himself in front of the open door by the wall and let the draught from outside caress the joints of his feet, also the neck, also along the temples.