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At the University of Texas at Austin. 34 boxes of his, including the first page of Infinite Jest and annotated copies of the books he read. I would love to see this stuff, especially his comments and doodles in the margins of the books in his collection, but it's strange to imagine what happens to all the stray pages, first drafts, notes, etc. after a writer dies. In Kafka's case, his entire writing career was spawned from his friend Max Brod ignoring his last request.

"Dearest Max, my last request: Everything I leave behind me ... in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters (my own and others'), sketches, and so on, [is] to be burned unread."

Yeah, didn't happen, and a good thing, too -- because now we have Kafka. But I always wonder how much our hunger and curiosity as readers goes against the wishes of the writer themselves. On a related note, here's an interesting opinion piece vying for a dead writer's right to privacy, a la J.D. Salinger.

I don't know. Food for thought, as they say. Which reminds me, I'm hungry.

Classic Poets Read: Robert Lowell

Here's "The Old Flame," an enjoyable poem by Robert Lowell, who, aside from being considered the founder of the confessionalist school of poetry, led a seminar at Boston University attended by poets like Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath.



I don't care if it's uncool these days, I still love those confessionalists.

Classic Poets Read: Edna St. Vincent Millay

One of my favorite sonneteers! Ms. St. Vincent Millay's poems give me iambic pentamerous chills. I wanted to post her classic "What lips my lips have kissed" or "Only until this cigarette has ended," but alas, I couldn't find accessible versions of her reading either of these. I'm sure they exist somewhere.

Here is her reading "Love is not all."



Ms. St. Vincent Millay's voice is quite Marlene Dietrichy. It's so strange to hear these well-known poems read aloud by their authors -- their voices never cease to surprise me.

Classic Poets Read: T.S. Eliot

One of modernism's Greats reads his famous and arguably best poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."



I was surprised by his voice and reading style, somehow. I don't know what I was expecting: not this.

I'm not the hugest Eliot fan. I worship this poem and this poem alone, and have read "The Waste Land" and couple times, a book of his selected poems, and a couple of his literary essays. He's kind of a dogmatist when it comes to criticism, insisting that great works of literature can only be born from extensive study and alignment with the literary tradition preceding it -- i.e, dead white dudes. Overall, I didn't find his arguments particularly compelling on this issue.

Still, this poem sends me reeling even after the hundredth read, and it's different hearing the words from Eliot himself.

Classic Poets Read: Anne Sexton

This week and next I'm posting a short series of links to classic 20th century poets reading their work aloud. To go back and hear these long-past poets' voices gives us contemporary readers/listeners a bit of insight into the charisma and personality that, along with their writing, played into making these people famous figures in the literary world. Plus, I'm a stickler for the classics.

Anne Sexton was, and still is, my favorite poet. The Awful Rowing Toward God was the first book of poetry I read front to back and it really stuck with me. The first time I heard a recording of her reading her poetry aloud, I got goosebumps all over my body. She has an incredible, chilling voice, a cigarette-husky drawl that accentuates the eeriness of her poems. Listen to her read one of her definitive poems, "Her Kind," originally published in her first collection To Bedlam and Part Way Back in 1960.



Sexton was a histrionic and famously disturbed woman who apparently used to fall into bizarre trances after giving a reading like this. I've read her biography by Diane Middlebrook, which, like many biographies on writers/ musicians/ etc. shed a not-so-pretty light on Sexton. Sexton was suicidal, in and out of hospitals, a distracted mother, unfaithful to her husband, dramatic, selfish, a bit vain and quite bizarre. But a fascinating woman, and a wonderful poet.

Day Jobs and Daydreams

All novelists dream of being paid to write novels. The sad fact is, despite talent and hard work and even luck itself, such an opportunity is about as unlikely as unlikely gets. This article confronts the issue of what working writer Emily St. John Mandel dubs "The Double Shift" -- those of us who work full-time and moonlight as writers, not for the $ (because there is none), but for the love of.

The best part is her discussion of Kafka and his bureaucratic hellhole of a job -- without which, or course, The Trial never would have been written. Sometimes, as mindnumbing and soulsucking and timesquandering as working a quote-unquote regular job might be, it constitutes the fodder that shapes the style and subject matter of the writer. Or, as St. John Mandel puts forth in the article, in Kafka's case (and probably many of our own) full-time work often serves as a convenient excuse for the writing we do not do.

Interesting article. Read it.

Kurt Vonnegut Draws Doodles

This is funny/ enlightening/ awesome.

I Love Shirley Jackson

I've managed to -- I know it's a foreign concept as an English major -- actually read for fun recently. And I've discovered I would so much rather be reading Shirley Jackson than any more critical theory or Middle English renditions of saints' lives. This past summer I read a collection of Jackson's short stories and The Haunting of Hill House, which were absolutely marvelous, dark and thrilling and even sometimes hilarious, and Hill House made its way onto my nonexistent list of favorite books. Last week I finished We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and I'm currently reading her comedic non-fiction book Life Among the Savages that chronicles her travails as a writer/ housewife/ mother in the forties and fifties. The more I read by Shirley Jackson, the stranger I find it that no one I know seems to read her, besides her short story "The Lottery" widely anthologized for high school students. While Jackson was popular in her time, she seems to have disappeared off the contemporary face of the literary map. She's best known as a "horror" writer, but that title doesn't do her justice. Any definitive supernaturalism is hard to pinpoint in her work. Instead, much of her short fiction and Hill House and Castle center around domestic spaces and awkward female characters, with an overwhelming darkness threatening below the surface of these kitchens, houses and small New England villages. Like Hitchcock's movies, Jackson's fiction works to expose the perverse and subversive desires that exist behind the artifice of the everyday, the malignant capabilities of average people, and the brutish danger of mob mentality.

Also, sidenote: I'm perplexed and impressed by the adverb-heavy style of Shirley Jackson's prose. In writing workshops everyone always scorns the adverb, which I get, since most people throw them around thoughtlessly. But I've always thought the right adverb has its place as long as the writer knows how to use it. Toni Morrison and other famous fancies have written the adverb off as a weak and lazy choice for the writer who can't find an appropriate verb to do the job. I've always been a little wary of general writing rules like that, and think a good writer can find a way to use adverbs -- or anything, for that matter -- appropriately, albeit sparingly. Rules are made to be broken, right? I study Jackson's prose to better understand the artful use and misuse of the adverb. Her adverbs -- while maybe a little incessant -- sometimes add quite a bit to her prose.

To sum up: Shirley Jackson = highly recommended. If you've never read her, start with The Haunting of Hill House or The Lottery and Other Stories and move on from there.

A couple links to her work online:

"What a Thought"

"The Lottery"