Saturday, November 21, 2009
If I ever dare...
I might sound like a broken record when I say that I don't think I'll ever get married. The most persuasive reason for me to ever dare to get married is to avoid dying an embarrassing bachelor's death such as choking on baked beans that I'd be eating out of a can while wearing a greasy white t-shirt which hasn't been changed for two weeks, and while watching old sitcoms on a tiny old television. If I ever dare to, I will have to do what Robert Parker or Tim Burton do, and live in the same house, but split so that I have my own half and she gets her own.
Besides my view that relationships tend to be Rube Goldberg devices which clunk up pleasurable ends such as conversation, intercourse, and good company, my gravest concern is what gets buried along with me after I pass away, if I have to go first. I would hate to have my dying wishes defied. As what has happened to Vladamir Nabokov.
He is a writer whom I like, but I admit, need to get better acquainted with. When he died in 1977 he was in the process of writing a novel. He had ideas jotted down on note cards. He told his wife to destroy them. She never did. And now, 32 years later, after his wife passed the cards down to his son (don't even get me started on my thoughts on having children), it's been published as the most useless work of fiction I have ever seen, and I have to sell Twilight books. I was surprised to find out about it as I found myself shelving it the other day at [Pages]. I asked my boss [Amber Danielewski] if I could remove the plastic wrap of one to see what it was like in there. I wanted to see what made it worth 42 Canadian smackeroos. The answer: nothing.
The entire book is a series of one sided note cards centred in the pages. Now obviously, I understand the significance of Nabokov, and literary critics tend to barely contain their hard-ons over such memorabilia, I don't see the point of their publication. Not even a rough draft. Just a basic schematic. I'm as it stands, a nobody at this time, but even now, I would be mortified if any of any preliminary material for my work were made public. They are ideas which tend to make only enough sense to the writer to be used as a springboard for the first draft, and are subject to change.
What bothers me so much about it? I mean, on the other hand, I have read many works published posthumously, such as the work of Franz Kafka, who, like Nabokov said he wanted his work destroyed, and 2666 by Roberto Bolano, who intended for his work to be published beyond his life. And last month, I was doing cartwheels over the fact that a book of Kurt Vonnegut's unpublished short stories were released. The difference is that they were actually in the form of prose rather than just notes. Prose is a format more ready for public perusal.
To bring it back to having a spouse and children, they're not the only villains. It can be anyone, anyone who you trust to leave your work with. But in most cases, who else would people trust more to handle their intellectual remains? Given I a piano doesn't drop on my head, or some other spontaneous death blindsides me, I will make sure that if I feel my death impending, I'll shred, burn, and delete anything I have in the works that I don't want seen in the public eye.
See everyone in hell!
