Jeff VanderMeer points to a discussion of the proper disposal of Nabokov’s final, unfinished manuscript, The Original of Laura. It’s in a bank vault. Nabokov wanted it burned. Should it be?

I have probed my moral intuitions carefully and, while I have no definite answer, I find that Nabokov’s wishes deserve substantial respect; the wishes of a very recently dead author, say Kurt Vonnegut, would deserve very great respect; and the wishes of any author alive today will, in the sadly inevitable event of his or her death, deserve overwhelming respect.

However, as I go back in time my solicitude for the author declines; so I am only moderately conflicted about the decision of Kafka’s literary agent to override Kafka’s (d. 1924) wishes and posthumously publish his work; I am almost completely indifferent to whether or not Dickens (d. 1870) would have wanted us reading the unfinished Edwin Drood; and I would regard it as laughable to care about whether it’s OK to go through the private notes and manuscripts of, say, the Venerable Bede (d. circa 735), or Catullus (d. circa 54 BC).

My respect for the author’s wishes declines slowly but steadily over the course of the twentieth century, and drops precipitously after 1914, bottoming out at so what? at roughly 1850. People who died prior to 1850 are things, vague phantoms, soil; who cares what they wanted?

So much for time. What do my intuitions say with respect to how far away the author lived from me? I’d probably rather not find out.

[Skirting up to the edge of spoiling, hopefully not crossing it]

C-1. A lot of people are complaining about the behaviour of Cloverfield’s protagonists — they find it implausible that Rob and Lily and Hud and whatsername would go back to rescue Beth. So did I, at first; but I’ve found it works better if you bear in mind that all of the protagonists have, at the moment the monster attacks, been drinking for at least four hours. Does that help?

C-2. The easily-missed significant moment in the film’s coda hugely enhances its creepiness and poignancy. I won’t spoil it, except to say that its sad irony puts one in mind of Auden’s Musée des Beaux Arts – “In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away/Quite leisurely from the disaster; the plowman may/Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,/But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone/As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green/Water.”

C-2.5. In fact, on one plausible reading of the film — not original to me, but I forget where I saw it — the significant moment may be the real reason why the US government has saved and classified the tape, which otherwise contains nothing much that wouldn’t have been duplicated by a hundred thousand other cameras and camera phones. If that’s true, all Hud’s efforts with the camera are even more worthless than they already appeared to be, everything we’ve seen is simply beside the point, just something annoying for future researchers to fast forward through, and this is an extraordinarily bleak film.

C-3. If, like me, you live and/or work in a tall building with good views of Manhattan, Cloverfield will enormously enrich the mental/visual vocabulary that you use in all your future strangely consoling daydreams of mass disaster and devastation; Cloverfield has other virtues, but even if it didn’t I would recommend it for that reason alone.

C-4. Notwithstanding the above, the business with the Statue of Liberty’s head is completely lame.

IAL-1. For a man of apparent good health and relative youth, who has been entirely alone for three years, who can reasonably expect that he will never again see or be seen by another human being for as long as he lives, who can acquire absolutely whatever he wants in the way of non-perishable consumer goods, and who knows where the video stores are, Will Smith’s character in I Am Legend seems to have filled his home with remarkably few embarrassing heaps of pornography. Is this because the studio felt that it would be too shameful, that it would undermine the audience’s respect for the character? Were they scared to make him unsympathetic and ridiculous? Surely not, or they wouldn’t have made him a fan of Shrek.

New job this week, after months of full-time writing.

People sometimes ask, “What do you like most about writing?”

And the only possible honest answer, in retrospect, is that when you’re writing full time you do not have to commute — that in fact you can remain utterly innocent of the insides of trains at rush hour, the way a pet lamb is innocent of the inside of slaughterhouses.

Everything else pales in comparison.

Everyone who doesn’t know what the previous post was about please ignore it.

Here in this post I am keeping three more reviews, which I have rescued from the internet, which I will be sheltering here, safe from link rot, safe here forever in my possession like precious beautiful songbirds.

“It’s easy for the reader to forget that this is Gilman’s first book, thanks to the skill with which he builds his world — which speaks of a far more seasoned author. Although the protagonists are all male, female readers will find much to identify with. This is a fascinating tale of intrigue, hope and wonder.” — Romantic Times

“Gilman has invented a vividly imaginative world and is rightly compared to Dickens for the rich and varied characters he has created. . . . When the book shines, it really shines. I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys fantasy fiction.” — Decatur Daily

“Thunderer is certainly a colorful debut from Felix Gilman. Even Gilman’s opening pages show a deep imagination at work. . . . Thunderer reaches a conclusion that urges the reader toward the next book of this series.” — The Kansas City Star

I am cutting out all critical remarks from these reviews in order to make them more beautiful and precious. I am not linking to the originals because I have no integrity, none at all.

mother of god there are a lot of you

i’m scared now

Went to a comedy club the other night. Small crowd. Got sat very near the front, in the middle, on a sort of raised tier thing so that the various comics could see whether I was laughing or not. Generally I was not. Tried to do a sort of fake smile/laugh thing, just to show willing, but it wasn’t very persuasive.

A certain amount of eye contact proved unavoidable.

What is the correct etiquette when a comedienne is staring bug-eyed at you, bent double, slapping her own buttocks, bellowing fuck my ass, fuck my ass, oh yeah, do it, in an apparent attempt to force you to laugh, which you are unable to do? She is staring and indeed pointing at you personally, and this is obvious to everyone. What do you do? Her tone is ironic, loud, resentful. She has repeatedly announced that she doesn’t give a shit whether the audience likes her or not, but frankly you have your doubts about that. You’ve already tried smiling politely and it doesn’t seem to have resolved the situation. You can look away but you’ll have to look back again sooner or later and she will still be there, slapping and staring and shouting. Now she’s snorting.

This is a serious question.

What day is it?

God, really? It feels more Thursday-ish. Are you sure?

Is it cold outside? It looks cold outside. Best not to risk it, I think.

Best not. Best not.

I love this post:

I am completely sympathetic to how southern Africans invoke ideas about witchcraft to explain how some people obtain wealth. Obviously it isn’t my own explanation, but there’s a sense in which it’s a completely reasonable attempt to connect the visible surface of material and economic life with the largely invisible mechanisms that move resources and capital around beneath the surface.

I want to steal it wholesale.

. . . many ordinary Americans are not wrong to think that some of what afflicts or haunts their everyday lives is happening on scales of time and change and causality that aren’t reducible to the kinds of neat policy packages and governmental initiatives and ten-point plans that highly competent, experienced, meritorious political candidates tend to showcase. Like southern Africans, many ordinary Americans may invoke vague and metaphysical ideas about conspiratorial action and sinister agency to explain those larger transformations, but the basic take-away (as in southern Africa) is often: we’re fucked.

Especially this line:

. . . people who perceive the present as a slum left behind by a low-rent version of Benjamin’s angel of history.

And god do I want to steal the discussion of ‘zvidoma,’ malevolent spirit manifestations of the mysteries of capital. . .

I want to steal this post, spray it, change its plates, hide it in a lock-up until the heat’s died down, and bring it out repurposed as my obligatory “Why I write fantastic/weird fiction” post.

Maybe I will, maybe I will.