Category: Blog Post

Kill your darlings.

This is the command given young writers when they’re learning to edit their stories and poems. (It usually comes directly after the first piece of advice for novice authors: Quit now.)

Kill ‘em dead. The line is attributed variously now to Faulkner, now to Hemingway. Extrapolated, it’s something like, ‘take your best sentences, and get rid of them. Chances are, if you’re impressed with your own writing, you’re being too cute.’ Really it’s just another injunction highlighting the masochistic aspects of this practice. Editing is peeling away dead skin, but there’s some pain involved.

Vladimir Nabokov compares a first draft to a loogey you’ve coughed into a tissue – it’s this ugly thing that you don’t want to show anyone, but also it came from deep inside you. At the end of his life, it seems the author of Lolita and Pale Fire took the editorial call to arms a step further than most.

Nabokov died in 1977, leaving behind 138 index cards with a draft of his last novel, The Original of Laura, scribbled on them, and instructions that the cards should be destroyed. (In terms of darling killing, this is something like being an accomplice to murder, I think.) Last week, Dmitri Nabokov – Vladimir’s son – announced he was publishing the manuscript.

I’m reminded of a scene from Don Quixote, when the beautiful Marcela comes down from the hills and confronts a group of travelers. Anyone who looks upon Marcela, it’s said, will immediately fall in love with her. She’s here to tell them not to look:

"Heaven made me, as all of you say, so beautiful that you cannot resist my beauty and are compelled to love me…But until now heaven has not ordained that I love, and to think that I shall love of my own accord is to think the impossible…The limits of my desires are these mountains, and if they go beyond here, it is to contemplate the beauty of heaven and the steps whereby the soul travels to its first home."

And, having said this, and not waiting to hear any response, Marcela turned her back and entered the densest part of a nearby forest, leaving all those present filled with admiration as much for her intelligence as for her beauty. And some…gave indications of wishing to follow her, disregarding the patent discouragement they had heard.

What always bugged me about this episode was that, if Marcela doesn’t want people to see her, she shouldn’t come out of hiding. I suspect that deep down, like everyone else, she likes to be doted on from time to time.

I have the same suspicion of Nabokov’s feelings toward his ‘lost’ novel – if he wanted it destroyed, he would have destroyed it. Dmitri, at least, insinuates as much in an interview with The New York Times. "I also recalled," he said, "that when my father was asked, not very long before his death, what three books he considered indispensable, he named them in climactic order, concluding with The Original of Laura – could he have ever seriously contemplated its destruction?"

The same thing happened about eighty years ago, when Max Brod decided to publish the manuscripts that his good friend, Franz Kafka, had left behind – despite the fact that Kafka wanted his texts destroyed, as well:

Dearest Max,

My last request: Everything I leave behind me (in my bookcase, linen-cupboard, and my desk both at home and in the office, or anywhere else where anything may have got to and meets your eye), in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters (my own and others’), sketches, and so on, to be burned unread; also all writings and sketches which you or others may possess; and ask those others for them in my name. Letters which they do not want to hand over to you, they should t least promise faithfully to burn themselves.

Yours,
Franz Kafka

As Dmitri doubted his father’s intentions, so too did Brod doubt Kafka’s:

Franz should have appointed another executor if he had been absolutely and finally determined that his instructions should stand.

I am far from grateful to him for having precipitated me into this difficult conflict of conscience, which he must have foreseen, for he knew with what fanatical veneration I listened to his every word…I never once threw away the smallest scrap of paper that came from him, no, not even a post card.

Coming to the end of this blog post, I’m finding that I don’t really have a point to make. These are just things that happened. I’m not here to reprimand the authors for attempting -genuinely or not – to destroy their works. Rather I find comfort in the fact that, even on their deathbeds, these writers were still playing head games with those they held dearest. And, of course, I’m thankful to Brod and Dmitri Nabokov for not being the literal-minded readers that might actually have fulfilled their respective authors’ (faux) requests.

 

I’m of two minds about street food.

Personally, I find it unsatisfying. I don’t like to walk and eat (too messy!), and I hate the taste of wooden sticks and skewers. Yet, there’s something about a bustling city street dotted with steaming food stands and vendors that makes me happy. I’ll take a stroll the crowd, even if I’m not moved to stop and nosh.

But I’m well aware there are diehard fans of hotdogs in waxed cardboard boats, streetside falafel, and chili-roasted nuts served in canny little paper cones. In fact, the great Calvin Trillin made his mark as a food writer by sniffing out the best little stands from Singapore to New York.

If you’re one of Trillin’s minions, you’re in luck. Because not only is tomorrow (Thursday, May 8) the opening day of MOSAIC Marketplace on the Nicollet Mall, it’s actually supposed to be intermittently sunny outside. And — get this — so far as anyone can tell, it isn’t going to snow!

Every Thursday from 12 – 5 p.m., these local restaurants will be cooking up global fare:

Manny’s Tortas

La Loma Tamales

Pham’s Deli &
Holy Land

And there will be live entertainment, too. Tomorrow will be a crisp 64-degree day with a gentle northeastern breeze, plus a troupe of Celtic dancers jigging and reeling their way up and down the mall. Here’s the full schedule of acts:

May 8 – St. Paul Irish Dancers
May 15 – Tapestry Folkdance
May 22 – Jawaahir Middle Eastern Dancers
May 29 – UNL Dance Squad
June 5 – Mayan Dancers

Of course, Thursday is also Farmer’s Market day on Nicollet, so after you’re done eating, watching, and — perhaps — dancing along, you can pick up some fresh asparagus. What could be better than that?

In the wake of the Great
War there was Dick Tuck, and Dick Tuck begat Donald Segretti, and
Donald Segretti begat Karl Rove. Karl Rove’s further begetting remains
undisclosed.

Dirty
tricks come to politics when politics become seriously political.
Before Richard Nixon spends those Watergate dollars burgling Democrats’
offices and spying on their psychiatrists, Nixon himself is dogged by
campaign mysteries and malfunctions of suspiciously organized origin.
Nixon’s hound is Democratic political operator Dick Tuck (his real
name; you can look it up).

Tuck
begins his career with Helen Gahagan Douglas, Nixon’s 1950 opponent for
US Senate; later he squires for presidential crusades of Adlai
Stevenson, Jack Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy. In each campaign, his best
remembered assignment is to make Richard Nixon look foolish. Sometimes
this is not a difficult task. After Nixon’s first 1960 TV debate with
John Kennedy, legend portrays Tuck hiring an elderly woman, who wears a
large Nixon button, to greet Nixon as he exits a plane, plant a kiss on
his cheek, and gush, "That’s all right, Mr. Nixon. He beat you last
night, but you’ll win next time." In 1968, the lore continues, Tuck
hires visibly pregnant women to carry signs with the Nixon campaign
slogan, "Nixon’s the One," at Nixon rallies. And so on.

Tuck’s
peculiar pleasure is Nixon’s agony. Tuck is preoccupied with Nixon,
but Nixon is obsessed with Dick Tuck. The emotional open window
exposes Nixon’s paranoid and vengeful soul. Hunter S Thompson, a
darker, less balanced Nixon antagonist, later opines, "Nixon was so
aggressively evil that he almost glowed at night. His political
instincts were so dangerous that he made the politics of total
opposition a very honourable trade for two generations of the best
people in America." Whatever. Nixon decides to hire his own Dick Tuck.

From
Nixon’s Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP) in 1972, a friend
offers Donald Segretti the job. Barely out of Vietnam and the JAG
Corps, a young and impressionable Segretti stalks Democrats in "black
advance." His object is to sow dissension among Democratic campaigns.
Dragnetted in the larger Watergate scandal, Segretti’s labors earn four
and a half months prison time, on misdemeanor charges of dispensing
false campaign literature ("campaign literature without proper
attribution," he recalls), and a two-year suspension of his California
law license. At trial, Democratic prosecutors flaunt a faked letter, on
Democratic presidential candidate Ed Muskie’s stationery, alleging
fellow Democratic candidate Henry "Scoop" Jackson had an illegitimate
child with a 17-year-old.

Karl
Rove comes to CREEP after dropping out of school to become College
Republican National Committee executive director. Rove labors for
Segretti on the 1972 campaign. 28 years later and in full control of
Sauron’s scepter, "Bush’s Brain" finds his old boss on the opposite
side. Segretti is John McCain’s 2000 Orange County campaign chair.
Beyond irony, a South Carolina push poll of mysterious origin ravages
McCain: "Would you be more likely or less likely to vote for John
McCain for president if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black
child?" The beat goes on.

April 2008, BBC News reports: A helium filled giant pig, born one of Pink Floyd’s Animals
and now a metaphorical billboard for Roger Waters’ political agenda,
floats high over the crowd at the Coachella Valley Music & Arts
Festival in Coachella (where else?), California. Its belly paint spells
"Obama"; adjacent is a checked box (see approx 3:30 here). The BBC newsreader pauses, then muses whether thousands of stoner
Floyd fans will vote for Obama per instructions from a flying pig.

Later
reports say The Pig "broke free from its tethers" and "drifted away."
After two days, residents of La Quinta, a country club community
fingered by conspicuous consumption rag the Robb Report as "the
nation’s leading golf destination," wake to find the Capitalist Pig in
pieces — "like pulled pork" says one of the finders — on their
manicured lawns (no, I’m not making this up). Still later, CNN reports
"organizers" had cut The Pig’s mooring cables. This assertion is
unconfirmed. Chris Willman of Hollywood Insider is thinking
black advance. "Is it possible the shredded pig was blown out of the
sky by a Clinton or McCain supporter with a rocket launcher?" asks
Willman.

Home in Corona
del Mar, two hours from Coachella, Donald Segretti denies knowledge of
The Pig’s abduction and apparent assassination. He’s been out of the
black advance business a long time. Segretti is forthright and more
than contrite about the Nixon campaign work. He decries the South
Carolina tactics in 2000 and those between Obama and Clinton campaigns
in 2008. Why do it? "The job is to get candidates elected," he says
quietly, "There is no second place." He avers his 2000 campaign work
for McCain followed the credo "no negative campaigning". "You learn a
lot as you go along in life." Out of politics, he allows he "wouldn’t
be unhappy" with an Obama presidency, provided the product is as
advertised.

Dick
Tuck is unrepentant at age 85. He won’t confirm or deny legends about
pregnant women. Tuck has published a political newsletter for over 30
years. He called it The Reliable Source until The Washington Post appropriated that moniker. "Don’t even think about suing someone who buys ink by the barrel, " Tuck growls. Still a fouille-merde, he renamed his letter WashPostIt. Tuck has also set up DickTuck.com, but to date the site is pretty bare.
He says, if it’s worth his while to come, he’ll reserve a men’s room
stall at the Minneapolis-St Paul airport main terminal for the
Republican National Convention, but expects "a long line". He dismisses George W Bush as inconsistent: "He lied to get us into war; why not lie to get us out?" Tuck disavows personal knowledge of Coachella events, but claims, "If it had been twenty years ago, they would have blamed me."

Dead
since 1994, former President Richard Nixon could not be reached for
comment on The Pig’s demise. Campaign finance reports indicate daughter
Julie Nixon Eisenhower has maxed out on primary election contributions
to the Obama campaign.

It’s unclear whether these events are related.