When Vladimir Nabokov passed away in 1977, he was working on a novel working-titled as The Original of Laura. Nabokov gave explicit instructions to his wife Vera that this project should never be published, going so far to demand the manuscript be burned and destroyed forever.  Vera wrestled with this the rest of her life, choosing instead to keep the novel locked in Swiss vault; when she passed away in 1991, Laura still remained. Today the BBC has posted an interview with Vladimir’s only child Dmitri, who serves as executor of his father’s literary estate.  Back in April, Slate critic Ron Rosenbaum reported that after a great amount of soul-searching (which involved a ghostly visit from Vladimir himself…), Dmitri has given the green light to publish the book. It will hit the shelves sometime next year.

As with most things Nabokov, there’s a healthy and vigorous debate brewing over whether the author’s intentions with the project outweighs said project’s literary and social significance. Nabokov had pulled a similar move earlier in his career with the drafts of Lolita, and it is widely known now that Vera very literally saved that novel from its maker’s cruelties/fireplace.  We also know that Vera was absolutely crucial to Vladimir’s writing and publishing career, and while she didn’t go so far as to publish Laura, she did consciously decide to let it remain here on earth with the rest of us.  Dmitri has obviously made the decision to bring his father’s manuscript fully into the light, and his doing so raises interesting questions about what truly does/should survive once the author has long since passed on.

I’m very interested to hear what others think about this.  Your thoughts?

For Episode 009 Shane and I teamed up with Shawn Rider from GamesFirst! for a conversation on Braid and Little Big Planet. We also talk about the social potential of gaming, web games journalism, multimodal art, and some of the other titles we’ve been playing recently.

Chiasmus Press author and all-around awesome human being Stephen Graham Jones will be in my fair city this Wednesday evening for a reading on the Portland State University campus. The event is from 6-8 pm at the Native American Student and Community Center (710 SW Jackson St) and is open/free to the public.

Two of my favorite writers, Matt Briggs and Doug Nufer, are having a “PowerPoint Off” next Tuesday up in Seattle. If you reside in the Emerald City and give a rip about the writing scene therein, please try to attend:

On November 18th, 2008 at 7:30 PM at the Jewel Box Theater in Belltown (free of charge), Matt Briggs and Doug Nufer will present their “roadmap” for the future of the community writing organization Richard Hugo House. Neither is affiliated with the organization. And neither you. Present your own vision of the future at powerpointoff.blogspot.com or come to the party to heckle, cheer, and consider: is a community writing center a halfway house or school?

Great essay by Judith Butler here on what Obama’s election to the U.S. presidency means when legal bigotry against homosexuals in this country continues largely unabated:

It becomes all the more important to think about the politics of exuberant identification with the election of Obama when we consider that support for Obama has coincided with support for conservative causes. In a way, this accounts for his “cross-over” success. In California, he won by 60% of the vote, and yet some significant portion of those who voted for him also voted against the legalization of gay marriage (52%). How do we understand this apparent disjunction? First, let us remember that Obama has not explicitly supported gay marriage rights. Further, as Wendy Brown has argued, the Republicans have found that the electorate is not as galvanized by “moral” issues as they were in recent elections; the reasons given for why people voted for Obama seem to be predominantly economic, and their reasoning seems more fully structured by neo-liberal rationality than by religious concerns. This is clearly one reason why Palin’s assigned public function to galvanize the majority of the electorate on moral issues finally failed. But if “moral” issues such as gun control, abortion rights and gay rights were not as determinative as they once were, perhaps that is because they are thriving in a separate compartment of the political mind. In other words, we are faced with new configurations of political belief that make it possible to hold apparently discrepant views at the same time: someone can, for instance, disagree with Obama on certain issues, but still have voted for him. This became most salient in the emergence of the counter Bradley-effect, when voters could and did explicitly own up to their own racism, but said they would vote for Obama anyway. Anecdotes from the field include claims like the following: “I know that Obama is a Muslim and a Terrorist, but I will vote for him anyway; he is probably better for the economy.” Such voters got to keep their racism and vote for Obama, sheltering their split beliefs without having to resolve them.