Subject: Re: Reclusion?
From: Tim O'Connor (oconnort@nyu.edu)
Date: Wed Mar 22 2000 - 15:45:50 EST
On Wed, Mar 22, 2000 at 03:06:50PM -0500, Benjamin Samuels wrote:
> Thanks for yout responses Tim. The Japanese issue seems only to be related
> to some small part contained in a message, then reprinted in repsonses, so I
> think it is safely in the past.
Phew!
> One hand clapping is more of a non-answer in my book. I'm not asking about
> enlightenment.
I'm sorry if it came off as a flippant response. What I meant was that
it is a riddle of sorts, something we will have a hard time answering,
assuming that it can be answered at all.
> Is it? Are there other examples of artists, writers and musicians who
> turned to create work only for themselves- not to be shared?) Of course
> there's some possibility of a plan for sharing work yet to be revealed, but
> this is beyond our knowledge.
I think of Emily Dickinson, Kafka, even Sylvia Plath, who noted in her
journals when she was working on poetry that was not to be seen by
anyone until she was ready for that. Kafka directed that his friend Max
Brod burn all K's work upon K's death. Fortunately, Brod violated the
trust and we now have a wealth of Kafka literature. Plath's
less-censored diaries will be appearing in the U.S. soon, superceding
the old edition from the early 1980s, which was heavily censored by the
Plath estate and Ted Hughes.
For different reasons, there's even the other great man, Van Gogh; he
didn't hide his work away, but the marketplace wasn't interested until
after his suicide, so his acclaim was posthumous.
> By the way Tim, I get the impression that you're involved with quite a bit
> of research on Salinger, is this just personal interest or something more
> deliberate? Would you mind a quick introduction to your work and maybe your
> relationship with the list? On or off list as you please.
It's a great personal interest, because (as with so many other people
here) his work has been an enriching part of my life for a long time,
even possibly a formative part. It's very deliberate (I pack-rat
anything related to him or his work). "[My] work" is almost entirely
fiction, but it has appeared only in the kind of tiny magazines that pay
you in free copies or pay nothing at all. I've also occasionally done
writing for hire, but that's grunt work that I consider fleeting. But
I plod along with fiction, which is my most serious interest.
My relationship to the list is that I act as its custodian and
caretaker. Think of me as the house janitor. I pay (not a lot of
money) to house it and archive it as a kind of public service that
I enjoy greatly, and "roughdraft.org" is a web site that I have
envisioned as a portal for writers. Perhaps as a place for serious
fiction writers to post extracts of their work, maybe getting agents
or editors to "discover" a new writer; perhaps as a "work chat" site
for writers or a locus for a kind of writer's workshop. I haven't
sketched it all out yet.
I don't have a lot of extra time these days, so the site itself
is kind of moribund, except for the Salinger section. The rest
remains more or less static until I have time to work on it.
Thanks for asking. Sometimes I forget that people join and don't have
the past history in their heads, when these things were discussed
previously.
Cheers!
--tim
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