Thread of Max Brod Hate

with friends like brod you don't need any damn enemies

During his lifetime, Franz Kafka burned an estimated 90 percent of his work. After his death at age 41, in 1924, a letter was discovered in his desk in Prague, addressed to his friend Max Brod. “Dearest Max,” it began. “My last request: Everything I leave behind me . . . in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters (my own and others’), sketches and so on, to be burned unread.” Less than two months later, Brod, disregarding Kafka’s request, signed an agreement to prepare a posthumous edition of Kafka’s unpublished novels.

max brodie

no way thank god for brod

<3 B-rod

Bro-d

Max Brah'd

Max Brodcore

Thread of Brash Mod Hate

In 1921, he told Brod that his last testament would consist of “a request to you to burn everything.” Brod promptly replied that he would do no such thing: his main justification, in later years, for overriding Kafka’s wishes.

Brod was a singularly unappealing character, but not burning those novels or diaries was the right move.

I have been pondering the ethics of Brod's decision for ages. Personally I cannot but be happy for his transgression and Kafka wasn't around to take umbrage, so...

"Take my papers and burn them!" is some emo drama attention-seeking bullshit anyway. No way he meant it.

of course he meant it, he burned 90% of what he wrote

yo brod apologists go get your own thread this is for people who think something than their own aesthetic jollies actually count for shit

xp He could have burned the remaining 10%, too, but he gave it to his number one fan instead.

fully support the right of artists to destroy their own work, but I'm just saying

FK: Take my pornos out and burn them! Before my mom gets here.
MB: I will do no such thing.

guys it's cool, i was in an emo band for like a day that was called Kafka's Ghost and we contacted him to see if he was cool with it, he was, and also said he was fine with brod too, so no worries

http://rlv.zcache.co.uk/ladies_dark_basic_t_shirt_template-r2ff3b06b961646b4a08336c7cd94e24a_f0czy_512.jpg

his "friend" had the stuff already because he liked having his friend read it while he was alive. The idea that a guy who torched all the shit he himself personally had copies of didn't mean it when he told his friend "burn the stuff you have or that I didn't get to" is so self-evidently false (and Brod's "I told him I wouldn't do it" so totally, obviously a self-serving claim without substantiation) that there's no real counter save "lol, keep telling yourself that"

p. shocking to me that Mordy's in the pro-Brod camp though - don't you do work in ethics, Mord?

Haven't read the piece.

Whether Kafka meant it or not is neither here nor there, don't care if its false. When you show your work to someone else you pretty lose your rights over its ownership and its eventual fate.

^^^ most odious opinion I can imagine on this subject

When you show your work to someone else you pretty lose your rights over its ownership and its eventual fate.

no way you sicko

oh sweet so the new Aerosmith is mine?

(xpost)

let's ask jose luis borges what he thinks

The fact is, a man who really wishes to see his work consigned to oblivion does not entrust the task to someone else. I believe that Kafka and Virgil did not truly want such destruction to take place; they merely longed to disburden themselves of the responsibility that a literary work imposes on its creator.

yeah but then again he said burn them.

The case of Franz Kafka seems to be more complex. His work could be defined as a parable or series of parables on the theme of the moral relationship of the individual with his God and with his God’s incomprehensible universe. For all their contemporary setting, his stories are less close to what is conventionally called modern literature than they are to the Book of Job. They presuppose a religious conscience, specifically a Jewish conscience; formal imitation of Kafka in another context would be unintelligible. Kafka saw his work as an act of faith, and he did not want it to discourage other men. Because of this, he asked his friend to destroy it. However, I suspect further reasons. Kafka knew he could dream only nightmares and was aware that reality is a continuous sequence of melancholy nightmares. Added to which, he appreciated the dramatic potential of delays and postponements; this is apparent throughout his work. But both these themes, melancholy and delay, undoubtedly wearied him in the end. He might perhaps have preferred to be the author of a few happy pages — such as his honesty would not allow him to write.

ok forget i asked.

death of the author

Harlan Ellison wants his wife to do the same thing, really hope she pulls a Brod so we can get the last fucking Dangerous Visions book.

Borges is a book fiend and will craft any self-serving argument in the service of there being more books in the world

Harlan Ellison wants his wife to do the same thing

is this really true? he's so in love with the sight of his own name it's hard for me to imagine but he's also a big control freak so I can see it. w/TLDV the stories should all revert to the authors obviously but anything he wrote for it should be consigned to the fire barring other instructions, should he ever die, which he probably won't, he's probably got some AM the supercomputer future already mapped out

Proust's maid obeyed her master's wishes to burn his papers and diaries I think. Now she was the sick one - only thing is there is so much else left that it will keep us busy enough so its not as disastrous if Brod had complied w/K.

I think Genet meant to burn one of his novels and never went through with it and wish he had...can't remember which one now. Probably being a cry-baby like K.

Artists just make the work, and that's the way it should be.

^^^ guy keeps making my point for me about how diligent artists much be in destroying as much of their work as possible. meanwhile I'm getting a Proust's maid tattoo, there's an actual hero for you

every destroyed work is a victory against the grotesque sense of sensate entitlement expressed by "readers"/consumers like xyzzzz___

so, the platonic ideal as a professional artist is to sell your work to people who will immediately burn it without consuming it, is the takeaway I'm getting here

the ideal situation is to make the one work that cures you of the desire to create, destroy it, and go back to being a line cook

DJP - what you are getting is an "artist" being a drama queen.

well that's just unpleasant

“What is it they want from a man that they didn't get from his work? What do they expect? What is there left of him when he's done his work? What's any artist, but the dregs of his work? the human shambles that follows it around. What's left of the man when the work's done but a shambles of apology.”

^^William Gaddis

"My dear friend Max Brod, when I die, I ask of you one thing: burn my Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, Yelp, LinkedIn, Gmail..."

I plead guilty to the grotesque sensate entitlement indictment but the fact remains, that you and I have read works that Brod rescued. Like Borges I am a book fiend, but the ethics of Brod's decision aside, we are nonetheless enriched by his (conceivably) pernicious acts.

Franz K is the mayor of Jungborn sanatorium

that's kind of an unsustainable position re: kafka, xxyyetc. He did the hard work of destroying the stuff he still owned afaik - claiming "drama queen" on artists who actually do the best they can to get their wishes carried out isn't fair or sporting. I mean I get that you're trapped in an 80s understanding of the death of the author but everybody else moved on from that shit ages ago.

there's certainly an aspect to this that is akin to having amazing, mindblowing sex with the corpse of the person who kept telling you "no" while they were alive and wearing provocative clothing

brb, jackin'

otoh "The Trial" rules

woah

In most respects, Brod and Kafka could not have been more different. An extrovert, Zionist, womanizer, novelist, poet, critic, composer and constitutional optimist, Brod had a tremendous capacity for survival. In his biography of Kafka, Ernst Pawel recounts how Brod, having been given a diagnosis at age 4 of a life-threatening spinal curvature, was sent to a miracle healer in the Black Forest, “a shoemaker by trade, who built him a monstrous harness into which he was strapped day and night.” Brod spent an entire year in the care of this shoemaker, emerging with a permanent hunchbacklike deformity, which did not impede him in a lifelong series of overlapping relationships with attractive blondes.

aero have you read the stuff Brod saved?

the ideal situation is to make the one work that cures you of the desire to create, destroy it, and go back to being aline cookn insurance adjustor

Yet he singularly failed to do this and referred to contemptuously to his Brotberuf.

two things seem pretty obvious to me:

1. leaving aside kafka's wishes for the moment, we are all extremely fortunate to have kafka's work to read
2. max brod is a steaming pile of human shit. blatantly betraying the written wishes of the dead, particularly a dear friend, is about as shitty as it gets.

dead people are dead

I think we should make the world a better place for people who aren't dead cause their happiness matters more than dead people happiness

good news

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/15/world/middleeast/woman-must-relinquish-kafka-papers-judge-says.html?_r=0

i know ppl itt calling kafka a crybaby are just trolling but seriously, it was the man's dying wish that his own work be destroyed. this shit wasn't published - that would be a different story - but denying an artist that finality he so desperately wants is pretty gross i think

no, he had that finality

lol @ dead people

now he's dead

I think we should make the world a better place for people who aren't dead cause their happiness matters more than dead people happiness

― iatee, Friday, November 9, 2012 11:14 AM (31 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

idunno, brod got lucky that kafka happened to be so good. the act itself is the shitty thing imo

there's certainly an aspect to this that is akin to having amazing, mindblowing sex with the corpse of the person who kept telling you "no" while they were alive and wearing provocative clothing

― I loves you, PORGI (DJP), Friday, November 9, 2012 11:06 AM

*forwards post to FBI*

aero have you read the stuff Brod saved?

I was getting into it in high school like most people and then as I got into it I started reading the supplementary stuff in the anthologies about how he wanted it destroyed and I thought about it some and thought "you know what, fuck this, this shouldn't have been published." It seems personally kinda shitty to me to read stuff that the guy who wrote it explicitly did not want to exist, so once I'd thought that q through I stopped reading Kafka.

i like how we've arrived at the 'it is impossible to have moral obligations to the dead' defense quicker than anyone bothered to articulate the 'but ... but ... GREAT ART' defense

not impossible, just dumb

cool, i dig that xpost to aero

dead people are dead

past isn't even past iirc

aero suppose kafka had in fact said "dear max brod, i have unbeknownst to you trained in secret as a doctor and i have carried out research that will enable humankind in the future to wipe out smallpox five years earlier,* thus saving lives numbered in the thousands, however i hate this work and i want you to burn it", where would you stand on this

*kakfa in addition to being a medical doctor in this counterfactual is also a soothsayer

thomp are u talking about what americuns did with nazi and japanese ww2 medical experiments

that's kind of a facile comparison

no i don't know anything about that, i'm talking about a hypothetical world in which franz kafka was a virologist who could see into the future

i'm happy to have kafka's novels and the aeneid and whatever other stuff, but the kind of reverse causality defence of brod makes a mess of what seems to me to be a pretty simple ethical question. yeah the world is a better (and maybe more notably, ~different~) place for having these works in it, but even as much as brod liked the works that's not something he could have reasonably foreseen, so ultimately his act was the act of a douche.

I don't think its fair on people who like to read to be told they are entitled consumers or whatever -- that is drama queen behaviour there.

Its fine if you'd like your work destroyed, but people who make works need to be better at destroying them. Not showing them to anyone and building people's enthusiasms for them in the first place would be a start..

Kafka never did anything of substance to get his wishes carried out (never mind "his best"). That was a pathetic note.

the correct thing to do would be to copy the cure to smallpox, burn the original, then anonymously mail the copy to contemporary author-doctor Herman Hesse

i am not as extremist as aero in that i will totally read his work though, i mean if there's this amazing literature that everyone else gets to read i'm gonna read it too, my own morals be damned. similarly i hope to god salinger kept like 20 glass stories lying around

aero suppose kafka had in fact said "dear max brod, i have unbeknownst to you trained in secret as a doctor and i have carried out research that will enable humankind in the future to wipe out smallpox five years earlier,* thus saving lives numbered in the thousands, however i hate this work and i want you to burn it", where would you stand on this

no sale man, sorry. I know, I know - Kafka's work has been meaningful to many, and who's to say it hasn't "saved their lives"*, but it's not really analogous in any way to the theoretical situation you propose. medical science is not self-expression.

*me

what if the cure to smallpox was a short story about a dude turning into a box elder bug

artists can be the worst stewards of their own work, the ideal situation is to hide all of their works from them until they are dead

what if my dying wish is to have all my organs burned untransplanted but my license says 'organ donor'

I got arrested trying to burn down the Salinger compound the day after he died :(

cool story brod

Salinger probably has a contract as part of his estate detailing exactly what to do with all that stuff he was writing over the years, dude was not afraid to use lawyers

I was going to make a joke about EII giving us a great plan for putting artists into veal pens and having them pump out work but then I went "... oh right, Disney"

maybe anne frank didn't want you reading her diary did you ever think of that nosy parker

p. shocking to me that Mordy's in the pro-Brod camp though - don't you do work in ethics, Mord?

sorry, kafka's work was worth the ethical breach to preserve

tbh i think dr kafka has every bit as much right to burn his smallpox research as novelist kafka has to burn 'the trial' but enh ethics

"artists can be the worst stewards of their own work"

I'd go further by saying they really only make it. They can't judge it, or actually know very much about it, its a mystery to them - its not only that they are too close to it. Something more...fundamentally clueless about people that write.

Not knowing much about Brod I would say he was Kafka's best friend by preserving his work. An act of love, really..

tbh i think dr kafka has every bit as much right to burn his smallpox research as novelist kafka has to burn 'the trial'

people often have the right to be dicks but it's often better if they weren't or if their dickish desires were frustrated.

I'd go further by saying they really only make it. They can't judge it, or actually know very much about it, its a mystery to them - its not only that they are too close to it. Something more...fundamentally clueless about people that write.

in deference to your position, Blanchot, one of my favorite theorists, believes this, and making this contention is kind of his life's work: that the work remains forever obscure to the artist. OTOH literally the only defense one can make of this contention is "well, that's how it seems to me, anyhow" - your reading of an artist's work is a better judgement of it..how, exactly? Because you say so? Because that's how it seems to you? Nonsense. Artists may be poor judges of which works of theirs the public will like best, or which will seem most perfect to critics; they're still the only real judges of which of it's any good or worth preserving.

aero i feel like you and me have been arguing about this for like a decade now, but my basic take it: brod was a dick, but on the other hand, kafka's dead, i can't imagine wherever he is right now he gives a shit since he was more than happy to be gone from this wretched place, plus also i'm alive, capable of reading, and these frozen seas inside myself aren't going to axe themselves all on their own.

so once I'd thought that q through I stopped reading Kafka

You can't escape the influence of the Brod published (and edited) works on the culture generally, however much you try.

are parents allowed to kill their own children? ; )

yes.

i believe ol' franz would say parents are slowly and unconsciously attempting to kill their children from birth until one of them croaks.

but then he was a whimsical dude.

the only real judge of any work is the person experiencing it, if a single person in the whole human continuum ever receives pleasure from a work then it's worth preserving.

He didn't mean "burn them" burn them, he meant save them to a dvd-rw

can you imagine pharoah tutankhamun's mortification at having his personal effects on display like common bric-a-brac

burn the museums burn them all

i am curious about this property of 'self expression' which allows a man to retain some kind of ownership in his life's work whereby he can destroy it regardless of whether this is a total gain in felicity or utility for the world, i don't know, what if he'd made a bunch of really neat furniture and told brod to burn it

like it seems like the hardline position requires us to believe that aesthetic felicity is of no real benefit to the world / no utility / just a matter of getting our own particular aesthetic rocks off

also i am aware that coming up with counterfactuals is going to be inevitably bathetic -- dear max brod, everything i leave behind me in the way of artisanal bacon mayonnaise i want you to burn untasted ..

he wasn't saying "burn them," he was saying "boo-urns, boo-urns"

btw everyone i fully expect you to nuke every contribution i've ever made to ilx when i croak.

i expect to do so within two to three weeks so get cracking on that now is my advice.

You can't escape the influence of the Brod published (and edited) works on the culture generally, however much you try.

umm...ok? if this is a workaround to "...and therefore, there's no ethical question in the reading of something whose author desired that it not be published" I don't really think it works. If a guy steals a dollar from his friend and later on I'm on the corner begging for quarters and the thief gives me one I don't feel culpable for the theft. BTW have you got a quarter

dying wish of the slash-and-burn mod style godfather

xp

also it's going to be p much impossible for artists to make this request in the present via the pirate bay

aero you claim to hate max brod so much i am beginning to think you secretly love him. it's like moonlighting.

perhaps stet could run a custom script that would auto replace every strongo post in the history of ILX with a choice GARU G post

this is all setting up my three-volume "Tribute to Max Brod" mixtape

He didn't mean "burn them" burn them, he meant save them to a dvd-rw

― Albert Crampus (NickB), Friday, November 9, 2012 11:35 AM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

haha

like one day we're gonna walk in and find you and max brod making out and reading sections of the trial to each other in colonel klink voices.

I'm sure david carradine's dying wish was for someone to burn the rope, mop up his spooge, and arrange him nicely on the bedspread but things don't always work out for dead people

I've only read Blanchot's Death Sentence (and love that book very much), not his theory...my POV comes from what artists often say about their own work.

I can't see how K was the best or "only real" judge - best judgment in this case would have been destruction of the work as soon as it was completed, read over and judged to be unfit for consumption of the entitled population at large.

aero, do you find Brod "annoying"

"it would have been so pointless to kill himself that, even if he had wanted to, the pointlessness would have made him unable." "just shut up and ravish me, you virile czech glory hound."

given all the awful shit people's heirs/executors tend to do their ancestors' works max brod hate seems perfectly reasonable to me

way too many xps

"burn my head" - ted williams to his children
"haha no im gonna freeeze it" - his children

hahahaha

I don't really think it works.

No, I'm just pointing out the reality that even if you wish to keep your hands clean by respecting Kafka's wishes and hence foregoing any reading of the Brod published works, you still live in a society where the ripples from those works have affected countless writers and millions of readers.

I always like to think about the counterfactual that this sitch raises - like how many works of art in fact have been burned, works of art that could have changed the world as much as or more than kafka's unburned work

my favourite thing about that Elif Batuman piece is this Etgar Keret quote:

“The next best thing to having your stuff burned, if you’re ambivalent, is giving it to some guy who gives it to some lady who gives it to her daughters who keep it in an apartment full of cats, right?”

underrated kubrick aspect ratios

how many works of art that are not dramatically burned but just left to moulder in cupboards

how many works of art never leave the artists' ~brain~

unborn zings

No, I'm just pointing out the reality that even if you wish to keep your hands clean by respecting Kafka's wishes and hence foregoing any reading of the Brod published works, you still live in a society where the ripples from those works have affected countless writers and millions of readers.

yeah that's not really...true at all? at least no more so than "a thief stole something and then bought something with his proceeds so if I participate in the economy in any way the ripples from the thief wash up upon mine briny shore" or something

everything is connected

how many chillwave bands were started because of a whiney g. weingarten post on ILM

ALL OF THEM

burn whiney g. weingarten

Ashton Kutcher travels back in time kills max brod and burns all of kafka's work

The Cockroach Effect

aero perhaps you should move to china where the government will be very very happy to burn your work for you

that's nice of them

I was getting into it in high school like most people and then as I got into it I started reading the supplementary stuff in the anthologies about how he wanted it destroyed and I thought about it some and thought "you know what, fuck this, this shouldn't have been published." It seems personally kinda shitty to me to read stuff that the guy who wrote it explicitly did not want to exist, so once I'd thought that q through I stopped reading Kafka.

― Inconceivable (to the entire world) (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Friday, November 9, 2012 11:16 AM (54 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i recommend graduating from high school

being an artist means never having to graduate from high school

http://thinkingclub.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/sark.jpg

BURN ALL NOVELS AND STORIES

"learn to watch snails" wtf kind of advice is this

乒乓 is a winner itt

"take lots of naps" this seems to be more "how to deal with being super high" than "how to be an artist"

y'all Brod defenders know that the work Kafka left behind was unfinished, right? that doesn't sway you one way or another?

take moonbaths

I don't support the burning of any art ever, Brod otm

"you are innocent" THIS ISN'T EVEN ADVICE, IT IS A DECLARATION

Imagine yourself magic?

I would say we should start a poll but honestly it would just turn me into a simmering ball of distracted rage

imo it was a dick move of Kafka to have asked this of his friend

PLAY WITH EVERYTHING

irl lolz

there's certainly an aspect to this that is akin to having amazing, mindblowing sex with the corpse of the person who kept telling you "no" while they were alive and wearing provocative clothing

― I loves you, PORGI (DJP), Friday, November 9, 2012 4:06 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

brb, jackin'

― Inconceivable (to the entire world) (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Friday, November 9, 2012 4:06 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

imo it was a dick move of Kafka to have asked this of his friend

― flopson, Friday, November 9, 2012 5:22 PM (12 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

he had TB at the time tho

y'all Brod defenders know that the work Kafka left behind was unfinished, right?

Not just in not burning the work but in editing and ordering the chapters in several works, Brod is eventually a posthumous (and unathorized) collaborator with Kafka.

he had TB at the time tho

i think its only right that anything said under the influence of TB should be legally invalid

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/0d/Mike_oldfield_tubular_bells_album_cover.jpg

The FK short stories are where it's at anyway.

^^^^^^^^^

"when I die, go to my basement and into the laundry room; you will find a hidden compartment behind the dryer. there you will find what I have been working on for the last five years but which I fear may not be finished before I die: the only existing pair of penis pants in the world. burn them."

you are a fucking hero

yeah that's not really...true at all? at least no more so than "a thief stole something and then bought something with his proceeds so if I participate in the economy in any way the ripples from the thief wash up upon mine briny shore" or something

rly? what if, i dunno (the counterfactuals are hard to come up with, cuz they didn't happen), socrates wanted his ideas to die with him and plato said 'alright man'? a lack of kafka can't have the kind of game-changing influence that would have but it would still be a different world in some notable sense. (it doesn't make it good, just true.)

Aero, what about already-published works which the creator disavows and wishes to be superseded by later editions. Am I acting unethically in listening only to Schumann's first published edition of Davidsbundlertanze and not his own preferred later boring edition?

no one mention George Lucas

your wish is my command

your wish is my command-Z

Aero, what about already-published works which the creator disavows and wishes to be superseded by later editions. Am I acting unethically in listening only to Schumann's first published edition of Davidsbundlertanze and not his own preferred later boring edition?

imo if you published it you gotta live w/the consequences. if you didn't publish it and left no instructions then you gotta expect people to get all vulture. if you specifically left instructions for anything you didn't get around to burning to be burnt and some asshole edits & publishes it then that dude's body should be placed in a latrine forever.

brb, wizzing on brod

so max brod is a flatterer then?

Max Brod is resurrected as a golem, comes from the past to burn Lucas' later works - sufficent for rehabilitating his reputation?

Max Brod can exonerate himself by destroying anybody else's art, yes, doesn't really matter whose as long as he gets it all

Maximum Brod

why are we not making more brod = bread puns itt?

(or am i remembering my german wrong)

From that piece:

According to the Israeli daily Ha’aretz, the banks have already yielded “a huge amount” of original Kafka material, including notebooks and the manuscript of a previously published short story.

Something to look forward to.

Max Brod can exonerate himself by destroying anybody else's art, yes, doesn't really matter whose as long as he gets it all

that would be some end-times-meets-Pokemon shit

Something to look forward to for me to poop on.

we'll all realise what the deal is when it turns out that among kafka's still unpublished works are the lyrics to 'love in an elevator'.

the elevator is a metaphor for father-hatred

is it true that during his lifetime l0u|s j4gg3r burned an estimated 90% of his posts and after his SB at 52, a post was discovered on de subjectivisten, addressed to his friend whiney g winegarten...?

love in an elevator
my father is also in the elevator

inscribed on St3ph3n Tyl3r's walking stick: i surmount everything
on my walking stick: everything surmounts me

there is no escape from the elevator, for the elevator is all of us

there are some sweet unreleased takes of "love in an elevator" iirc. joey kramer wanted to destroy them but thank god he didn't.

there is hope, plenty of hope, an infinite amount of hope, but not for those of us in the elevator, which is all of us, forced to love our hateful fathers

BEFORE THE ELEVATOR stands a doorkeeper on guard. To this doorkeeper there comes a man from the country and prays for admittance to the Elevator. But the doorkeeper says that he cannot grant admittance at the moment. The man thinks it over and then asks if he will be allowed in later. "It is possible," says the doorkeeper, "but not at the moment." Since the elevator door stands open, as usual, and the doorkeeper steps to one side, the man stoops to peer through the entrance into the interior of the elevator. Observing that, the doorkeeper laughs and says: "If you are so drawn to it, just try to go in despite my veto. But take note: I am powerful. And I am only the least of the doorkeepers. From floor to floor there is one doorkeeper after another, each more powerful than the last. The third doorkeeper is already so terrible that even I cannot bear to look at him." These are difficulties the man from the country has not expected; the Elevator, he thinks, should surely be accessible at all times and to everyone, but as he now takes a closer look at the doorkeeper in his fur coat, with his big sharp nose and long, thin, black Tartar beard, he decides that it is better to wait until he gets permission to enter. The doorkeeper gives him a stool and lets him sit down at one side of the door. There he sits for days and years. He makes many attempts to be admitted, and wearies the doorkeeper by his importunity. The doorkeeper frequently has little interviews with him, asking him questions about his home and many other things, but the questions are put indifferently, as great lords put them, and always finish with the statement that he cannot be let in yet. The man, who has furnished himself with many things for his journey, sacrifices all he has, however valuable, to bribe the doorkeeper. The doorkeeper accepts everything, but always with the remark: "I am only taking it to keep you from thinking you have omitted anything." During these many years the man fixes his attention almost continuously on the doorkeeper. He forgets the other doorkeepers, and this first one seems to him the sole obstacle preventing access to the Elevator. He curses his bad luck, in his early years boldly and loudly; later, as he grows old, he only grumbles to himself. He becomes childish, and since in his yearlong contemplation of the doorkeeper he has come to know even the fleas in his fur collar, he begs the fleas as well to help him and to change the doorkeeper's mind. At length his eyesight begins to fail, and he does not know whether the world is really darker or whether his eyes are only deceiving him. Yet in his darkness, he is now aware of a radiance that streams inextinguishably from the entrance of the Elevator. Now he has not very long to live. Before he dies, all his experiences in these long years gather themselves in his head to one point, a question he has not yet asked the doorkeeper. He waves him nearer, since he can no longer raise his stiffening body. The doorkeeper has to bend low towards him, for the difference in height between them has altered much to the man's disadvantage. "What do you want to know now?" asks the doorkeeper; "you are insatiable." "Everyone strives to reach the Elevator," says the man, "so how does it happen that for all these many years no one but myself has ever begged for admittance?" The doorkeeper recognizes that the man has reached his end, and to let his failing senses catch the words, roars in his ear: "No one else could ever be admitted here, since this door was made only for you. I am now going to shut it."

So never judge a book by its cover
Or who you gonna love by your lover
Love put me wise to her love in disguise
She had the body of Venus
That one day transformed into a cockroach
Well imagine my surprise

dying

in a painful yet totally earned way because i am a worthless speck on an indifferent msg board

my father is the elevator table

"Alas," said the mouse, "the whole elevator is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when I saw the elevator's walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am at the end of the elevator already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into."

"Talk about things and nobody cares," said Steven Tyler, and ate it up.

DJP flawless victory

taking nothing away from strongo's and underparsed-ideograms-i-can't-pronounce's posts

Is it true Aerosmith had a bootleg called LISTEN TO THIS BROD?

lmao

Oh no I'm thinking of Big Maxxed Woman

ok well I'm not gonna learn photoshop in time to do it or maybe ever but maybe some of yall ok thanks

http://static.rateyourmusic.com/album_images/17768118725feee5fa623ec55155dc02/522783.jpg

any art posted from rateyourmusic.com just shows up as a single pixel to me, not sure if it works for anyone else

it's like the anti-Brod is their webmaster

I must make a deux ex machina or - if you prefer - an ex cathedra appearance in this thread to inform you that I knew Kafka and Brod rather well, and skirmished on the outer edges of their circle in Prague, the "Arconauts". For I frequented the Cafe Arco, on the corner of Pflastergasse and Hibernergasse, where Kafka could often be seen with Kisch, Brod and Werfel.

My main memory of him is of his merry, slightly neurotic laughter. In fact, when he would read his works in progress aloud to his friends, he would often have to stop because he was giggling too uncontrollably. And, sipping kirsch one evening, I actually witnessed him telling Brod to burn his works, all of them, after his death.

He said it without laughter, but there was, if not a twinkle in his eye, then at least a curl of the feet, as if the lower righthand serif of a capital "A", bent, in a manner of speaking, into an italic pose by the strong gusts of a passing gale while walking by a riverside and wishing, at that particular moment, to be the "A" in the word "anhören", which means, of course, "to listen", which, I might add, was his main activity, for the wind happened to be keening across the water, making a sound which, if not musical -- and Herr A had no musical interests, though he had once proclaimed himself to "be music" -- was, at least, pleasing to a somewhat tormented copy clerk inhabited, on that evening, by minor demons who believed they had some purchase on his soul, if only a musical one...

It was as if this lower righthand serif, then, were a foot arched both playfully and seriously by its owner, advanced cautiously to obtain a surer grip on the slippery mud of the riverbank, against the admittedly-slim eventuality that Herr A should suddenly lose all resolve and, deciding to dispense with his recently-all-but-unbearable life, should throw himself down into the churning waters like a postcard thrust carelessly by a tiptoeing child into a postbox, or simply be tossed there, both with and against his will, by the storm, which, nevertheless, was now waning, its clouds scurrying towards the eastern horizon, leaving the slippery mud spread out beneath Herr A's left and right lower serifs as the most likely cause of whatever accident investigators would later, quite wrongly, file in the official report as the undoubted cause of Herr A's death, which in itself would subsequently rob all German words beginning with the letter "A" of their sense, and leave, for example, the word "antwort" as the ugly stub "twort", which in Silesia is a peasant euphemism for the female genitalia, and more specifically the genitalia of a virgin destined to remain a spinster.

So - in the light of all this, and of the possible destruction of so many German words beginning with A, including the name Adolf, which would have become "dolf", which in certain parts of Russia means "saviour" and would perhaps therefore have allowed Hitler to triumph over the Soviet Union, reversing the course of postwar history - I think we must be grateful that Herr A did not follow the instructions of his darker voices, just as Max Brod did not follow Kafka's instruction, which would have altered the course of, at the very least, literary history.

For Brod well knew that Dr Kafka, in his darkest moments, said that it had become clear to him ("as clear as in a child's lesson") that his writing was the reward for serving demons. And Brod also knew that, at other moments, Dr Kafka did not believe this at all. Brod also knew that Dr Kafka relished the fact that the instruction to destroy had been issued - and issued only - to a man who had assured him that he would not carry it out. The destruction was therefore, itself, destroyed in advance; the blotting-out blotted out, the vanishing vanished, the erasure pre-erased.

I have often wished that I could walk arm in arm with my old friend Franz through the streets of Prague and show him a bookshop display, a street name, a record cover, a museum, a statue, dedicated to him. Knowing Franz, I can assure you that he would be deeply touched, and weep for a while, and then smile in utter bemusement, for he was quite the most modest man I have ever met. He would be delighted, finally, to know that he was almost universally considered one of the most important writers of the 20th century, even if the reasons - the rise of a bureaucracy even more insane, vindictive and paranoid than those he imagined - would have appalled him, especially when he learned what this bureaucracy did to his favourite sister Ottla. But, given all this, Franz would certainly respect, in retrospect, the interpretation his friend Brod had placed on his request, and I believe we should respect it too. Because without it we would still have had the insane bureaucracy of the book-burning Nazis, but not its literary pre-cancellation, which is to say the preparatory dipping of German literature in an anti-inflammatory fluid made of Jewish tears.

http://www.sanpasqualbandofmissionindians.org/cms_uploads/fire1.jpg

am0n your choice of parent domain is A+

lololol

fyi I love this thread

as you were

tbh if i were lucky enough to be friends with a total fucking genius who had stacks of brilliant unpublished work and he asked me to burn it all after he died i probably...wouldn't. but i don't think i'd have rushed to have it published. i probably would've stored it in a vault or something and let my heirs figure out what to do with it.

kafka was kind of a dick for forcing this ethical dilemma on his close friend, imo. he should've just burned the damn stuff himself.

a first sign
of the beginning of understanding
is the wish to die
video gaaaaaaaaaames

kafka was kind of a dick for forcing this ethical dilemma on his close friend, imo. he should've just burned the damn stuff himself.

― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.), Friday, November 9, 2012 2:56 PM (33 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah that's what i said

first of all, he didn't force a dilemma; his wishes were clear. secondly, again, it's not like he died of old age! the dude got TB and died

can you imagine how insufferable he would have been if he actually lived to old age, though?

i fully recommend reading the trial it is a great book. the labyrinth of beaurocratic displacement, an ineluctable chain. how do we produce innocence or guilt withing the complexity of these mechanisms. a man bears a mark of guilt. a man is buried alive to save us all. take these letters and burn them my friend. i will do no such thing.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n05/judith-butler/who-owns-kafka

Is it true Aerosmith had a bootleg called LISTEN TO THIS BROD?

^^ key post

I do blame Kafka for this movie

http://a2.ec-images.myspacecdn.com/images01/31/b4fcbccd58714f4e287983df160c6d60/l.jpg

first of all, he didn't force a dilemma; his wishes were clear. secondly, again, it's not like he died of old age! the dude got TB and died

i dunno, maybe this is a whole separate issue but i've had friends who've died early and tragically and the thought of destroying anything they'd given me is painful. on the other hand, brod didn't just save the stuff for his own personal reasons -- he published it and made money off of it. (i assume? not really up on my brod biographies.)

aero how do you feel about ted hughes burning sylvia plath's diaries?

I'm practical about these quasi-ethical decisions. If I dislike the writer, then burn his shit.

just fyi, i was kafka in a play by Alan Bennett called "Kafka's Dick" in college which i highly recommend reading. plot synopsis via wikipedia:

Kafka's Dick is a 1986 play by Alan Bennett.[1] It is play about the nature of fame and how reputations are made.
Plot

Set in the present-day in a suburban Yorkshire dwelling, Kafka aficionado Sydney, and his wife Linda, are visited by Franz Kafka and his friend Max Brod who are both long dead. (Kafka had left instructions for all his works to be burned – instructions which Brod chose to ignore).

As we spend time with the unusual party, it becomes clear that Kafka's wish was for anonymity – and also that he had serious issues with his father. When his parent turns up, he is in possession of a very personal secret relating to his son – one which Kafka is terrified he will disclose.

just read that philip roth wants his papers/archives destroyed when he dies.

i wish franzen would burn his novels before publishing them.

Can't believe Philip Roth has TB

first of all, he didn't force a dilemma; his wishes were clear. secondly, again, it's not like he died of old age! the dude got TB and died

― all mods con (k3vin k.), Friday, November 9, 2012 3:39 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

not saying he forced a dilemma because his wish wasn't clear, the wish itself, cearly expressed, was the dick move; he knew his friend would want to publish it but told him not to & died

lol J.D.

i wish franzen would burn his novels before publishing them.

related: vladimir nabokov's son eventually publishing the notes for his unfinished novel against his express wishes

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Original_of_Laura

i've entrusted my daughter with terrabytes of unreleased aerosmith mp3s to publish on the event of my death

sweet, can't wait for the nine lives outtakes
didn't vladimir's ghost visit his son and tell him it was cool take the $$$$

& vlad's son was like thank you ghost dad

Honkin' on Brodo

take your brod off

give my regards to brod street

even tho I think it is stupid to care about what dead people want on any level, if you are gonna do that I think you should also project what these guys future opinions would be ie what would resurrected kafka 2012 think about being celebrated as one of the GOAT, he would probably like it, in fact he would probably think pre-2012 kafka was crazy.

I'd worry if there was a heaven.

at my funeral they will release 100 doves each with a CD-R of Jimmy Crespo guitar solo outtakes tied to their leg

right, but jewish people don't even believe in heaven, so if you are worried about kafka-in-the-afterlife being pissed off you are at the same time insulting his religious beliefs

xp

in conclusion anyone who doesn't love max brod is anti-semitic

Romney baptized Kafka

is Kafka in Gehenna?

Get a load of the manuscripts on that Brod!

http://stuartnoel.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/nice-beaver.gif

"Nice, brod!"

"Thanks! I had the manuscripts pulled out of the fire this morning."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GWGouymBxk

aero how do you feel about ted hughes burning sylvia plath's diaries?

I used to be like most Plath fanboys in high school about this (i.e. Ted you monster) and then this year I was reading more stuff about Plath and her attitude toward parenting and I guess Ted's claim is "the children really didn't need to ever hear that shit"? Paris Review, Spring 1995:

INTERVIEWER

Would you talk about burning Plath’s journals?

HUGHES

What I actually destroyed was one journal that covered maybe two or three months, the last months. And it was just sad. I just didn’t want her children to see it, no. Particularly her last days.

which seems like a decent reason to destroy them.

aero, have you read Janet Malcolm's book on Plath?

but then again

On the other hand Assia was probably behind Hughes’ burning of Plath’s final diary, the cause of great ill feeling toward Hughes among Plath scholars and enthusiasts, because she could not live with the hatred Plath expressed toward her there. She may also have found evidence that Plath’s original plan was to take her children with her in death, as in the Ariel poem “Edge.” (Koren and Negev quote a friend of Mrs. Plath’s to this effect.)

from here, a review of a book about a woman with whom Hughes had an affair. Who also committed suicide, using the same method Plath did.

xp no, I haven't

Am I reading you correctly that you haven't read any Kafka or Plath since high school?

he hasn't read a book since high school

books were mainly a high school thing for me

Recording deep cuts on Rock and a Hard Place distracted him.

it's okay, man, i've never even read a book

serious answer - no, I haven't read Kafka since I was a teenager. Plath I return to every few years. Her journals aren't her work, she prepared Ariel for publication iirc, there's controversy over the order I think but she had it in MS

unless archie double digest counts

though i never did read that unpublished archie ghostwritten by sylvia plath that got leaked to the internet a couple years back

from what i understand it was the bleakest jughead/big ethel shit though

Kafka's one of my blind spots. Every time I remind myself to reread him I go, "I will. What's for dinner?"

he would have approved of your basic indifference

i basically had to read all the major kafkas three times to 'get' them but it's totally worth it.

from what i understand it was the bleakest jughead/big ethel shit though

yeah it was almost...kafkaesque

archie's world is pretty kafkaesque anyway

perpetual adolescents trapped in the same banal routine for 60 years, overseen by indifferent higher powers

good description of ILX

good description of life imo

but then i'm pretty kafkaesque

http://www.boingboing.net/filesroot/200912211140.jpg

omg

yeah that's classic

serious answer - no, I haven't read Kafka since I was a teenager. Plath I return to every few years. Her journals aren't her work, she prepared Ariel for publication iirc, there's controversy over the order I think but she had it in MS

― Inconceivable (to the entire world) (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Saturday, 10 November 2012 00:19 (57 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yahhh this shit is way more heinous on hughes' part than burning diaries tbh?

like i think diaries should remain out of the public sphere unless their author seems particularly to be invested in their becoming part of the public sphere, whatever

plath's ordering for ariel kind of creates a sequence in which i. the speaker is deeply unhappy specifically because she's realised her husband is a bastard ii. she comes to some kind of independence, dignity, progress; hughes' version turns it into founding document of the sylvia plath myth, makes her romantically destined for suicide due to her own chemistry

n.b. plath may have been destined for suicide due to her own chemistry, i don't know that and no one does, the point is she didn't write a book about that. (and being abandoned by the father of her children, leaving her with two children and no real income, probably didn't help.)

http://threewordphrase.com/gregor.gif

lolol

I can't separate Cheever and Woolf's diaries from their achievements though :(

cheever wanted his published, which was tbh itself kind of an asshole move

I don't know anything about Woolf's diaries and from the tone of Alfred's post I'm glad that I don't 'cause her books are great

I meant her diaries are as great as her novels.

O I thought the frowny face meant you couldn't make the separation and you wish you could

When someone asks which Woolf to read I say To the Lighthouse, Orlando, The Waves and A Writer's Diary.

what about the diary of anne frank?

did Anne Frank have a friend who she explicitly asked to make sure her diary be destroyed?

anne frank wanted her diaries to be published -- she actually went back and rewrote earlier entries that she didn't think were good enough.

wish I could find the Cynthia Ozick essay about Anne Frank.

I cannot stop laughing at that last Gregor samsa comic

I have not read Kafka since high school which I loved at the time, but I want to read it again since I may be able to appreciate the humor more as a well adjusted adult than when I was a brooding teenager

it being the trial or Amerika or the shrt stories

A broding teen

aero dunno if you're still lurking this thread but I'm curious if you have established directives for the disposition of the undoubtedly extensive analog & digital materials associated with Aerosmith's creative process, vis a vis archiving/burning/cynical-easy-buck-making.

in general I find the weirdnesses of artistic executorship fascinating. My favorite thing to think about is the Beckett estate's extremely active interest in ensuring that productions of his plays adhere to his directions. The estate recently failed to halt a production of Godot with female cast members, but as the article says, succeeded in that line in the past.

am still pissed at Beckett's estate for nixing the all-Chuckle-Brother production of Happy Days

FK was such a miserable awful person that I really can't be bothered caring what he might've wanted. Did he order Milena to destroy his letters to her? Unlikely, as that might've necessitated normal decent behaviour. Fuck that guy, man

OTOH: Publishing a desperately mentally ill person's writings c/d

CLASSIC why bcz lols

(jokes, obv)

The Castle is kinda funny tbh

the castle is really funny!

i'm bleak tho

It wasn't very conciously done as a result of my stance in this thread -- more part of me reading/re-reading/trying to find more German Lit this year -- but I got around re-reading/more Kafka than I had in the past. I re-read The Trial (in a diff translation from the Muir), and then the letters to Felice and Milena, as well as the Diary, fo the first time.

All pretty incredible, anything this guy committed to paper was literature. Amazing to think of the conditions -- mental and physical at which much of this must've been written -- he transmit those to you, its the source of its power, but only one of many. The Diary is of such rigour. I only got to understand the points aero was making after reading it. He was incredibly hard on himself -- like an insight to what an artist with a capital A is really thinking. Its not so much whether Brod was his friend or not, its whether Brod understod him or not. If he had then you could see a burning. He didn't though = he did not understand his friend. And of course we all have friends we often don't understand.

There is a volume that collects the writing that Kafka published in his lifetime, tr. on Penguin by Michael Hofmann, and I suppose that + the letters to Felice - which he left no instructions for I suppose - would've been enough. I've been reading Buchner, and its about 300 pages worth of material there. I suppose my fear was that Kafka would've been wiped from history had Brod carried out his wish. It was silly to think so.

But in the end, no, you could never burn The Trial.

Probably fine to burn America as its first chapter was published during his lifetime.

Will get round to reading The Castle before the end of the year so I'll pass sentence then.

(slightly dull response to that post but)
how do you rate other translations vs the Muirs? (Me, I like them, but have spent very little time with other versions. )

(at least someone has read my post thanks)
The answer to that is I don't know (must've read the Muir a decade ago). According to J.P.Stern (in the intro to the Scott/Waller translation) the Muirs broke up some of Kafka's sentence structures, at times.

http://io9.gizmodo.com/terry-pratchetts-unpublished-work-has-been-destroyed-j-1798633413

https://www.thenation.com/article/who-owns-kafka/

New Directions is bringing out a volume of "lost" works, though they weren't lost, just untranslated -- here's an interview with their EIC about them, and one of the stories is in this month's NYer.

Was thinking about this thread while reading all that yesterday.

"My dear friend Max Brod, when I die, I ask of you one thing: burn my Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, Yelp, LinkedIn, Gmail..."

― 乒乓, Friday, November 9, 2012 11:02 AM (eleven years ago)

otm

Hah, I once told a friend about the central thesis of this thread and she looked at me like I was from Mars, the idea that Kafka's right to decide what to do with his art overrides the value of us now having that art was entirely alien to her.

Will get round to reading The Castle before the end of the year so I'll pass sentence then.

― xyzzzz__, Friday, 5 September 2014 bookmarkflaglink

I did get round to it. iirc it was fine, but its existence was not necessary.

I disagree, I think it's brilliant. The most faithful account of a dream I've ever read. The dream logic is impeccably observed, there's no superfluous bizarreries, and the symbolism is both ordinary and banal but eminently exploitable for Freudian/Jungian purposes. I find its creeping awareness of the nightmarish, endless responsibilities of young adulthood and the anxiety that comes with it to be eternally relevant.

The best part is when his goal is tantalizingly within reach but instead finds himself unable to stay awake