Thread of Max Brod Hate

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though i never did read that unpublished archie ghostwritten by sylvia plath that got leaked to the internet a couple years back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