I recall reading some of his unpublished writings after they were leaked on what.cd, and I'm sure if you dig around some you'd be able to find mirrors somewhere on the web. Included in the leak was "The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls", the supposed prequel to "Catcher in the Rye". The leaker claimed something like a 6TB(!) bounty for leaking it too.
The discussion in that request thread about how to get the novel out of the reading room where one of the most entertaining ones I’ve read. I wish there was a backup.
People were going crazy with coming up with plans and spy grade equipment to take pictures. Good times.
WCD was in a way Library of Alexandria of the private tracker world. It was just too good and didn't last forever like any other good thing. The only sad part is that nothing, of similar calibre, came after that. Btw couldn't find the leak anywhere though - searched by his name.
This gives me the same feeling as all these old Prince recordings from his vault coming out. On one hand it feels wrong on the part of the family/rights owners to release this stuff against the wishes of the deceased, but on the other hand I really want that forbidden media.
A few posthumous items are coming out lately and the same comment keeps coming up: it's ok to have conflicting feelings.
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.
Another unworkable posthumous wish was Albert Barnes, who was a patron of many impressionist painters around the turn of the last century: Renoir, Matisse, Degas, etc.
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.
The documentary, "The Art of the Steal", which discusses the move of the art, did not portray the people behind the move in a very flattering light. My recollection is that some called it the biggest art heist of all time.
An "evil genie" type can find all kinds of loopholes in a wish. I'd disassemble the building, move the pieces of it inside a larger museum with better public access, and affix the old walls to "structural remediation", which is to say that the pieces of the old building would be held up with steel beams and cables instead of each other. The "storage facility" for the other 90% of the collection would--entirely coincidentally--be arranged nearly identically to traditional museum viewing galleries.
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.
Wholeheartedly agree. Once you're dead, you're dead. One's last wishes should definitely be respected to the first degree. That is, whomever you will your money, possessions, or property to should get those things. There should not be any strings attached beyond that, to the extent that a living person could not tie those same strings (or choose later to untie them)
I’m not a lawyer, so I’m not sure. I imagine it would go to the state? Or you could specify the most extravagant funeral ever and be laid to rest in a diamond-encrusted gold coffin.
Property without heirs escheats to the state/crown. Wealth buried in your mausoleum goes to grave robbers, eventually.
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.
> 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.
Definitely. I'm comfortable with this conflict. I don't believe in an afterlife so I know the artists don't actually care, it's more of a respecting the memory thing. I'm happy to finally be able to access these unearthed works, but part of me always silently apologizes first.
Contrast Prince with Terry Pratchett, whose estate followed his wishes of destroying the hard drives containing Terry's unfinished works with a steamroller.[0]
As a fan I would not want to read anything the author felt was unfinished. Worse, in Pratchetts case, I hate the idea that he would have stopped writing out of fear that part finished things would be released after he died.
The interview makes it pretty clear that it isn't being published against his wishes. He wanted it out there, just not while he was alive.
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.
It might well be that it is a condition of his father’s will that he should make these arrangements. The royalties on “Catcher” alone are likely worth ten times what he could make from acting gigs (especially gigs he got: he was Captain America in that disgraced straight-to-video production...). At that point, might as well do things properly and carve yourself an essential role as the keeper of dad’s estate.
For anybody who is possibly interested, I suggest trying to read "Hapworth 16, 1924" (the last story he published). To me, after trying (I've found the whole story)... it's just... not worth the time.
"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.”"
I remember that huge bounty for them on What.cd (RIP) with various discussions about how to go about getting a copy out of the Princeton library. Good times. I think the request might've ended up banned to attempt to avoid attracting more attention to the site after Microsoft COFEE[0] was actually uploaded there.
Just scan it all and release the archive in the public domain.
I feel his soon is more interested by making $$ from copyright than really giving the archive to the fans.
On one hand it will be great to read more of his work but on the other hand I will have to read the god awful reviews and overhear my friends discussing these works at parties. J.D. Salinger is society’s most unflattering mirror.
Some will argue that it goes against everything Salinger would want. e.g. He doesn't want to be "judged" à la "Catcher in the Rye". However, if he truly never wanted them to be read, he would have burned them immediately after being written.
"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."
Why not take that to its logical conclusion and claim: if he truly never wanted them to be read, he would never have written them in the first place?
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.
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.
He should have put in his will and testament that all unfinished drafts should be destroyed. I don't believe it is possible to will property to people but put indefinite restrictions on legal usage of the property. I forget the exact term, but the restriction was put in place so that you don't get into a situation where estates are confined to operate in the manner that a long-dead great-great-great-great grandfather specified in their will, in contravention of the wishes of the current property owners who may have not even been alive when the will was written.
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.
Yes, but you may change your minde after writting it. Sometime you write something, and it's not what you think it would have been, and you don't want people to read it anymore.
This is one area the digital age hasn't come up with an analogue (other than DMCA). Authors in some ways had less control over distribution (aside from self publishing, you had to go through a publishing house) but had more control over what got published.
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").
