JD Salinger's unseen writings to be published, family confirms
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
People were going crazy with coming up with plans and spy grade equipment to take pictures. Good times.
We can acknowledge we'd like to respect the artist's wishes and yet, they are gone—and I think it's ok to delve into their hidden lives, as long as no-one living is going to be put to shame.
He bought thousands of famous works and arranged them to his taste, tightly packed on the walls in a tiny building in Merion, PA, USA. The good news is the foundation could bring out now priceless masterworks on easels to compare close up for art classes--my grandmother attended one--a rare opportunity anywhere, and anyone could tour for free.
The bad news was his will stipulated the works needed to stay as he arranged them, in that building, where there was only room to display around a tenth of his collection; the place was cramped, difficult to view the works, difficult to secure them, and probably a fire hazard for the works and the visitors.
Ultimately, after much debate and lawyering, the collection was moved to a modern facility down the street from the PMA in Philly. The letter of his will was overridden, but the intent--clearly public access and education--was followed.
Then I'd tilt some of the works askew by a few degrees, just to irritate his ghost.
The Earth belongs to the living. I would support a new rule against perpetuities that would limit the control a dead person may exert over their legacy to no more than 20 years beyond their own death--to include copyrights and patents.
You could pull a Goldfinger, and irradiate a bunch of gold bars, or otherwise render your wealth unvaluable or unspendable, but that just decreases the wealth supply and makes everything else in the economy a tiny fraction more valuable.
Even if you bought an extravagant Viking funeral, and burned your grave ship, and sank all your treasure to the bottom of the ocean, the world still turns without you. The value of money, goods, and services still depend mostly on the active participants in the economy. When you destroyed the representational tokens for the wealth in the economy that you controlled, their value was immediately redistributed to all the other tokens in existence, and those with the information about the destroyed tokens can theoretically earn arbitrage profit by spreading that information around.
The best you can do is to write a program that spends your estate after your death, give it to your lawyer to compile and execute on the legal mainframe, and hope no one can hack it before it accomplishes your intended goal.
This is way cooler than my gold coffin idea!
Finally, a use for Etherium I can get behind.
Now perhaps Salinger's son (and his widow) could be lying in the hope of profiting off his work, but if so he's chosen a strange way to go about it, blocking publication of his juvenilia and neglecting his own acting and producing career to spend what will apparently be the best part of twenty years collecting and editing it all.
Personally though, I think Matt Salinger's genuine. In fact, he comes across as extraordinarily respectful of his father's legacy. Would that we all had people willing to expend so much effort and care to honour us after we have passed.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/aug/30/terry-pratchet...
I'm happy that Max Brod published Kafka's works against his will that they should be incinerated.
One never knows.
Great point, though, on the potential chilling effect.
https://themillions.com/2015/06/hapworth-revisited-on-j-d-sa...
"One of the most critically derided passages of the story takes up around a quarter its length and consists entirely of Seymour’s absurd and entirely age inappropriate list of requested reading material: “the complete works again of Count Leo Tolstoy […] any thoughtful books on human whirling or spinning […and] both the French edition and Mr. Cotton’s wonderful translation of Montaigne’s essays.”"
caveat lector.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Online_Forensic_Evide...
Now, with digital distribution, once released, you can't put things back in the bottle (with a few exceptions like when Amazon or Apple do "recalls"), but for the most part, you can't undo things and that means authors have less control over what they produce. Maybe authors aren't allowed capriciousness anymore ("burn all my writings upon death").
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/25/books/jd-salinger-new-boo...
"But in 2013, a documentary about the author and a related book offered a bold assertion: He had not only continued writing, but also left detailed notes to his trust about releasing the material between 2015 and 2020."
To me it seems credible that a writer might want to hold on to some drafts, hoping to get round to editing them for publication, but doesn't want them edited by anyone else or published unedited. The question is, how to achieve that, seeing as one can't trust one's heirs? There are probably both legal and technical solutions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortmain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_against_perpetuities
There's also the expression "dead hand", but that may also refer to a Soviet strategic defence system, which has also been referred to as "hand from coffin", which is certainly more fun than the official name.
Maybe he wrote them as practice. Maybe he wrote them to experiment with a new style. Maybe he wrote them to explore his thoughts and feelings. Who knows.
It does appear that he was okay with these things being published, but in the general case it’s not true that someone writing means they want or intend it to be published or even read.