The recursivityness is terrific, no?

[oursin]

End of a Kafkaesque nightmare: writer's papers finally come to light

Okay, we will overlook the fact that these papers were known about - the person who had custody just obviously got great delight over teasing people about them before dying aged 101 - so 'coming to light' is not exactly the expression I would use.

And we will also overlook what is

Comments

[nineveh_uk]

I'm afraid that tales such as these always make me think first, "If I were an author who wanted her papers destroyed after my death, I'd make damn sure I got legal advice on how to word the will so that no-one got a penny until the burning was done, and that if it wasn't, it all went to the cats' home."

Although that authors _don't_ do this may of course be because they know that their stuff won't be burned, but if they say they wanted it to be they won't lose any reputation if it is badly reviewed.

[tree_and_leaf]

Yes, it's a warning to us all to make sure we choose our friends carefully....

The other thing that strikes me is that it's potentially rather rotten luck for the two German writers who have just brought biographies out (I forget their names, but there was a sensationalist article in Spiegel a couple of weeks ago along the lines of OMG KAFKA HAD A MESSED UP SEXLIFE!!!!111!!11) To which all I can say is, I don't really care, but it doesn't surprise me in the least.

[oursin]

OMG KAFKA HAD A MESSED UP SEXLIFE!!!!111!!

And this was news precisely why?

[tree_and_leaf]

I think one of them had published some new, and fairly frank, love letters to Felice Bauer, but this is 'new' in the sense of 'were in the archive all along' rather than 'I found it tucked behind a mirror in Kafka's old flat' (I'm not a Kafka fan, so I don't recall all the details). But it gave the Spiegel journalists a chance to get excited about possible threesomes while still pretending to be intellectual, and I don't suppose the publishers objected....

[tree_and_leaf]

Of course, to make this all truly in the right spirit, the records should be found to be completely trivial (Kafka's old tram-tickets) and/or in a state of irretrievable physical decay.

Kafka's collection of tram tickets, as munched on by enormous cockroaches!

(I don't know if cockroaches actually eat paper, but a friend of mine once lost an essay to slugs).

[noveldevice]

"My banana slug ate my homework" might fly at UCSC...

[tree_and_leaf]

My friend got away with it too, as her tutor was a mediaevalist, and therefore accustomed to Weird Shit happening to manuscripts (also, he knew what the quality of housing she was living in was like...)

[shezan]

What's the betting that underneath the piles they find A Enormous Cockroach?

*IZ DED*

*SO IZ KEYBOARD*