Thread of Max Brod Hate

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~