Happy Birthday, Seamus Heaney!

It's his birthday today, and lots of people are celebrating.

UPDATE: Here is his Nobel lecture, too.

Awooooooo!

I meant to post about this a couple weeks ago.

"Howl" is one of Allen Ginsberg's most famous poems. You may have heard the opening lines of part I in one form or another:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,      starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking      for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly      connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night

Ages ago I found that someone was sharing a recording of part I via my university network. Turns out this is a fairly famous recording, one of the earliest of Ginsberg reading "Howl". In fact, for awhile, it was considered the earliest known recording of said poem.

But recently a literary researcher uncovered a recording that was older still, "at the library of a private college here [in Oregon]". Which private college in Oregon, you ask? What else?

Reed College.

You can listen to the new oldest recording along with poems from the same reading here.

To Be or Not To Be: Determining the Fate of a Final Work

I'm a little late to the literary news table with this one, but that's okay.

Dmitri Nabokov, son of the late Vladimir Nabokov (author of Lolita, Pale Fire, and many others), is facing a dilemma: respect his father's wishes and destroy the literary genius's unpublished final manuscript, or fulfill the desires of the international literary community and publish it.

Honestly, I don't know what I'd do in such a situation myself. A part of me hankers to see this last work (and knows, too, that other greats made similar requests that went unheeded, much to our literary benefit), and another part of me understands the need to honor our dead loved ones and follow their final requests. Yet a third part of me has little idea why one would make such a request in the first place--unless maybe one felt that the unpublished work was crap. On the other hand, if I knew I wasn't long for this world and I still had unfinished works, would it really matter to me if people saw them after I shuffled off?