Death of an Author

In January JD Salinger died, and there's a lot of talk about what kind of literary legacy he might have left. He was reclusive and reluctant to publish, so there's speculation about piles of undiscovered manuscripts being brought to light now that his wishes need no longer be considered. This raises interesting questions about ownership, intellectual copyright, publicity. Should the work of deceased authors always be found and published? What about their letters? Their diaries? Do we have a right to read them? Do they have a right to prevent us?

There's also talk about film rights now that the stories are fair game. The Sydney Morning Herald this week published a kind of literary wrap-up that read like the New Yorker's Book Bench blog; it contained this gem:

If you really want to know the goddam truth, the news that Hollywood is trying to get its hands on the film rights to Catcher in the Rye just about kills me. It really does. Just on account of how some hotshot author died, and all, some crummy actor like ol' Jake Gyllenhaal is gonna end up playing me, Holden goddam Caulfield. Actors. Boy they irritate me. They really do. They're as phoney as hell. If I had a goddam gun to my head I would have to say that phoney ol' Tobey Maguire, or that goddam Harry Potter guy probably would be OK and all. At acting like crazy ol' me that is. It's crazy. But they'd do a good job. They really would. Wizards kill me. That Dumbledore. I'd like to meet him. Hey ol' Dumbledore. How ya doin', ol' Dumbledore? We'd just horse around and shoot the crap, me and ol' Dumbledore. What also kills me is that people forget that I turned 59 this year. So I don't wanna be played by any crummy ol' Leo DiCaprio who in my opinion is a very conceited character, or by that crazy Justin Bieber, either. I wanna be played by George goddam Clooney. Or that Cate Blanchett. She's terrific, she really is.

Miles Franklin Winner: It's a crime!

For the first time ever, a crime novel has won the Miles Franklin Award. Peter Temple’s book Truth beat shortlisted novels by Brian Castro and Alex Miller (two-time winner).  I’m only mildly interested as I don’t read crime novels and I think literary prizes are only the roughest of rough guides as to what we should read. Their primary function I think is to generate discussion.

 So on the subject of crime novels (leaving aside the more vexed question of whether they count as literature), is anybody else worried by the marketshare they seem to have? At bookshops the crime section seems to be at least half again of the entire fiction section. What does it say about us as a culture if that’s what we mostly read?

How I Imagine Ridley Scott Pitched Robin Hood

Ridley Scott : Ok, picture this: Russell Crowe...as Robin Hood!

Movie Producing Guy: That’s your idea?

RS: That’s it! The rest will write itself. I might add Cate Blanchett to give it a bit of gravitas, but I think Russell’s voice gives it plenty. You know that deep, gravelly voice he uses when he’s doing an English accent? They ate it up in Gladiator.

MPG: Ok, so Robin Hood. It’s a historical piece?

RS: Sort of. I’m gonna set it in the 12^th century, and since nobody really knows what the 12^th century was like, so we can pretty much just make it up.

MPG: We can?

RS: Sure! We just make all the props out of wood, throw in a few frolicsome dance sequences and call the alcohol ‘mead’, and nobody will know it isn’t the 1200s.

MPG: Hang on – isn’t the 12^th century the 1100s?

RS: Is it? I always get those confused. Anyway nobody in the audience will know that.

MPG: What about the dialogue? Didn’t people speak different back then?

RS: Probably – nobody really knows how they spoke, so we can assume it was pretty much like we do.  Anyway, historical dialogue’s easy. All you have to do is expand all the contractions – like ‘isn’t’ becomes ‘is not’, ‘don’t’ becomes ‘do not’ etc. Hey presto – it’s ye olde! Anyway with a film like this we won’t need much dialogue – just a few wisecracks to punctuate the fight scenes.

MPG: Well, Ridley, you certainly seem to know your stuff. What’s your time frame?

RS: Well filming will take a few months, but I could have the script to you by...COB today?

MPG: Deal!

Such have I dreamed

Friday poetry this week is inspired by a strange dream I had last night.  I dreamed I was sitting an exam about Thomas Hardy. I had to write an essay about him, and for some reason (in the dream it seemed like a stroke of genius), I’d called the essay “Too Big to Fail.” The pressure of the ticking clock and the muscles in my hand cramping around my ballpoint pen were vivid, but I was enthused about my subject, and preposterous analogies came thick and fast. When my alarm went off at 6:15am, I was just in the middle of a cunning allusion to Hopkins’ “Windhover”; somehow the gold gash in that poem was linked to the financial crisis and the fall of the dollar, which was in turn somehow linked to Thomas Hardy. I’ll never know whether my essay was as brilliant as it seemed in the dream (very unlikely), and as I never finished it I don’t know what the marker (whoever they might have been) would have given me. Nor do I know what a dream like this says about my state of mind (probably nothing complimentary), but I thought a Thomas Hardy poem about a dream would be apt today. I like this one because of the very odd meter.

A Dream or No

Why go to Saint-Juliot? What's Juliot to me?
I was but made fancy
By some necromancy
That much of my life claims the spot as its key.

Yes. I have had dreams of that place in the West,
And a maiden abiding
Thereat as in hiding;
Fair-eyed and white-shouldered, broad-browed and brown-tressed.

And of how, coastward bound on a night long ago,
There lonely I found her,
The sea-birds around her,
And other than nigh things uncaring to know.

So sweet her life there (in my thought has it seemed)
That quickly she drew me
To take her unto me,
And lodge her long years with me.  Such have I dreamed.

But nought of that maid from Saint-Juliot I see;
Can she ever have been here,
And shed her life's sheen here,
The woman I thought a long housemate with me?

Does there even a place like Saint-Juliot exist?
Or a Vallency Valley
With stream and leafed alley,
Or Beeny, or Bos with its flounce flinging mist?

February 1913.

Nothing now can ever come to any good

I love the funeral scene in IT Crowd where Reynholm Industries’ 2IC prefaces his eulogy by saying with great solemnity: “I’d like to begin by reading a poem that I saw in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral.” The surface joke here (I think) is the incongruity of elevated oratory and pop culture, but the underlying point is that pop culture topples elevation (indeed it’s supposed to). What starts as a touching scene about love and death, in which a forgotten and somewhat ironic poem is dusted off, becomes a cliché of unreconstructed emotion, a kind of emoticon for feeling sad. When things are ‘popularised’ they lose their quality of exalted singularity, their holiness. The sheen of the coin is rubbed off in its wide circulation. The upside might be a democratic redistribution of wealth, but the flipside is that the gold is gone. What we love, we love to death.

So now I’d like to share with you a poem that I saw in the show IT Crowd.

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.