Thread of Max Brod Hate

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