Thread of Max Brod Hate

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though i never did read that unpublished archie ghostwritten by sylvia plath that got leaked to the internet a couple years back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