I’m a Magpie
Now that I’m a student again, I decided to take advantage of the Mechanic’s Institute’s student membership rate. It’s a nice place to work during the day, and besides, I’m the opposite of Groucho Marx: I’ll gladly join any club that’ll have me as a member. So, I was browsing the shelves today, putting off working on an imminently due school project by looking for a copy of Ulysses to draft into service for my cousin and my oft-delayed reading group, when I ran accross an intriguing title: The Ghost Epigrams. Now, I’ll read almost anything with the word ‘ghost’ in the title. I think it’s the same thing that makes me so compulsively drawn to anything with a layer of dust on it: I love forgotten things, fantasize about opening doors that have been shut for centuries and finding someone’s forgotten hairpins or the foundations of a long-ago dismantled wall. So I pulled the book off the shelf. I was expecting something only tangentally related to ghosts. Maybe a series of poems devoted to memory, or maybe something Caspery about a house or, I dunno, death. But it was better than anything I could have hoped: a book of epigrams by Oscar Wilde “taken down through automatic writing by Lazar.” That’s right: they’re Oscar Wilde’s thoughts from BEYOND THE GRAVE. Which I seriously doubt Wilde would have approved of, considering he had such a great exit line. But he apparently had a lot more to say. Such as: “To become an optimist close one eye and believe with the other.” “Paradoxes: Thoughts that do not go to church on Sunday.” “Vulgarity is the rich man’s modest contribution to democracy.” “Mathematics are the bell boys of all sciences.” A note at the front of the book helpfully (if a bit agramatically) points out that these epigrams “have never appeared in any book of epigrams or aphorisms from the work of Oscar Wilde these are set down as they came from the master.” Just in case you confused it for An Ideal Husband. |
I'm a freelance writer and perpetual graduate student living in San Francisco. Special skills include dog charming, brochure writing, slapdash cooking and long-winded nattering. I also enjoy watching the sunset reflected in the tall buildings downtown.
For a while there, I taught classes on Classical literature, philosophy, and the history of religion at New College of California. I have an MA and an MFA in Writing, and started library school in the fall of 2009.
your beeeeegest fan
September 23rd, 2009 at 4:20 pm
Neat! I wonder what other authors are out there in the ether, waiting for a receptive “ghost writer” to pick up on their urgent transmitions from the beyond…
heh. ghost writer.
Dadoo
September 23rd, 2009 at 6:13 pm
Perhaps Aristotle will be so kind as to dictate his lost Comedics to someone, or the Beowulf poet will clarify a few words mangled by fire, time, and scribes. Charles Dickens could assist an eager posterity, still eager to know the fate of Edwin Drood. Ghost writing is sadly undervalued, and ghosts lack proper encouragement. Arise, I say, Arise!
Nora
September 23rd, 2009 at 6:22 pm
Confidential to Dadoo: Chris Z. says you should exorcise your inner writer.
Dadoo
September 27th, 2009 at 7:22 pm
According to Wikipedia, a “ghost writer” published the conclusion of Edwin Drood about three years after Dickens died:
“In 1873, a young Vermont printer, Thomas James, published a version which he claimed had been literally ‘ghost-written’ by him channelling Dickens’ spirit. A sensation was created, with several critics, including Arthur Conan Doyle, a spiritualist himself, praising this version, calling it similar in style to Dicken’s [sic] work and for several decades the ‘James version’ of Edwin Drood was common in America.”