The Blowfish Blog

[Caught in the Net] LitFuc

(Regarding the title, “LitFic” is a term for mainstream literature — you know, the respectable stuff — most often used by those who write genre work like science fiction or fantasy. So “LitFuc” is, um, literature about fucking. Maybe I should leave the neologisms to the pros.)

What prompted this column? Kafka’s porn. Yes, the author Franz Kafka, a writer so influential that the adjective to describe his work, “Kafkaesque,” has been appropriated by hipsters the world over, wrote hardcore kinky porn. One of the world’s leading Kafka researchers discovered the smut, and says it’s not for the faint of heart: “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.” (I personally wouldn’t equate bestiality with lesbianism, or call the latter inherently unpleasant, but I guess a lifetime spent studying Kafka might skew your perceptions of normality a bit.) Some of the smut will be published in the researcher’s book Excavating Kafka. And now next time you see a couple of drunk girls kissing in a bar, you can fairly exclaim, “That’s so Kafkaesque!

This next bit isn’t strictly literary, so much as extra-literary, but I’ll get there: Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, which was adapted into a film, which then inspired various spin-off films, most famously The Bride of Frankenstein, starring Elsa Lanchester with an improbable hairdo. Now photographer Aleksey Galushkov has re-imagined the Bride as a scantily-clad beauty, without being cheap or exploitative, and while retaining the feel of the original! It’s actually quite beautiful. And to bring things back to the literary, there’s another re-imagining of the Bride I should mention. Elizabeth Hand, one of the most talented writers and prose stylists working today, has written The Bride of Frankenstein, a vision of what the Bride’s life might have been like if she’d survived the events of the film. Check it out.

And no column about smut and the written word would be complete without one of Melissa Lion’s “Sticky Pages”, where the literary blogger digs into fiction and extracts the dirty bits for your perusal. This time the book under discussion is The Sexual Life of Catherine M, “the memoir of French, art critic Catherine Millet. She was also a connoisseur of the orgy and anonymous sex. The book itself is a detached account of so much of the sex she had. And it’s a lot of sex. The sex is on nearly every single page. Some of it is hot, some of it is uncomfortable, some of it, despite the content, is antiseptic in its cold observation.” Interested? Click the link to read the passage that kept Melissa up awake nights. It’s totally Kafkaesque.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, 13 August 2008 at 12:00 am and is filed under Caught in the Net. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.