He’s been dead for over 70 years, yet you can still find Kafka-related news items in a Google News search! Just thought I’d try it and see what came up. This one made my day:
Remember View-Masters? Those 3-D viewers with 14-scene “reels” that we loved as kids (I can still hear that comforting clicking sound when it advanced to the next picture) and our kids loved — and now they’ve unfortunately modernized them to the point they’re no longer recognizable? Anyway — I digress: A Portland, Oregon artist has created a variety of the disks that she apparently uses as performance art. In 2003, she began making her own reels for second-hand View-Masters starting by interpreting four of Franz Kafka’s “parables.” She read up on how to make 3-D photographs, built her own scenes on a card table, and glued the images into custom-printed reels. She packaged these and sold them at local craft fairs. Since then, she’s created others. Check them out at her website, Etsy.com. Though it was several years ago that she created these, the reason it’s popped up in recent news is that there’s an exhibition called “The Magic of View-Master” at the 3D Center of Art and Photography in Portland, Oregon through May 27. Awesome! I need to dig through my closets to see if I can find a new-old View-Master (the model my kids used 20 years ago; unfortunately, my sister’s old View-Master is somewhere in toy heaven, I think). I am so going to purchase those Kafka reels! I used to be a Kafka fanatic in my younger days when I first read “Metamorphosis” (if he were alive, I would seriously have been his stalker — I used to pore over photographs about him — my dream trip was to visit his gravesite). And this blog is stirring up those feelings again! When I do get them, I’ll report back here with a review.
I’ll be interested to see what they look like. Kafka is not a very visual writer, but his work has the quality of the visual artist, if that makes any sense.