The United States Postal Service recently announced that they were reducing the amount of time a person has to be dead before being commemorated on a postage stamp from ten years to five years. The left-leaning radio talk show host who announced this important development assured her listeners that this was not a conspiracy to get Ronald Reagan's mug on a stamp before his time, as presidents are automatically immortalized on stamps on their first birthday after death. This does not, however, rule out the possibility that a cabal of rabid Don Knotts fans and philatelists has conspired with the post office to ensure that no one has to wait to get Mr. Furley in lickable form. That is if Don Knotts is really dead. I have a terrible time keeping track of which famous people have died, and I am often surprised to find out who is still alive. I think that that is a common phenomenon. Perhaps forgetting who has died is a coping mechanism. Perhaps it is what immortality is all about.

Shakespeare seemed well assured of his immortality. At least for his sonnets anyway--he didn't seem to care that much about preserving his plays for the ages. The self-proclaimed "ever-living poet" granted eternal life to the subject of perhaps his most famous sonnet, the one about the dude who makes the summer day look like shit in comparison (and it is a dude that WS is writing about, by the way, at least in the first 126 of the 154 sonnets, but don't go getting any ideas, necessarily); this immortality is conditional, however. It only lasts as long as the poem lives.

Shakespeare's name has certainly lived long past his family line (never believe anyone who claims to be a descendent of Shakespeare, (unless of course history has hidden an illegitimate child from his biography)). Whether or not he deserves his reputation is irrelevant; either way he still got lucky--lucky that the world managed to preserve his work. Others have not been so lucky. The Book of Lost Books tells in great detail just how little we know about scores of lost works from antiquity to the present. We don't know what the world lost when the Library of Alexandria burned down, but I would bet that its loss led at least in part to the Dark Ages that followed. I suppose the Renaissance was largely an effort to learn from an ancient world that had been lost and recovered.

Later poets weren't so sure that their works would outlive them. Keats' tombstone marks "one whose name was writ in water." While his "Ode on a Grecian Urn" recognizes the immortality of art, it's an art that baffles him, just as his poem baffles so many of its readers. One of Keats' many attributed sets of dying words expressed a different sense of immortality--"I can feel the grass growing over me." It's one that echoes Whitman's "I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love/If you want me again look under your boot soles," and I am sure at least a thousand other verses. The euphemism "pushing up daisies" reminds us just as well as Whitman's blade of grass that "there really is no death." We can prove this sort of immortality scientifically. Maybe the thought of any other kind is vainglorious, fallacious, and greedy.

The coolest writers, after all, are the ones who didn't care about preserving their works for the ages. The Roman satirist Menippus, who though his works survive in only the slimmest fragments, influenced thousands of writers who have never even heard of him; Rimbaud, who abandoned poetry as a teenager after producing an unrivaled body of work; Comte de Lautreamont, who died at twenty after leaving behind one of the world's darkest, strangest, and most beautiful books the world has ever known; and Emily Dickinson, who would have been content to have her poems sealed in the tomb with her. The most tragic writers are the ones who died penniless and obscure, and often they are some of the best, which makes sense given that they most likely spent more time devoted to their craft than to making a name for themselves. The best book ever written has probably never been read.

These days most artists off all stripes seem more motivated by the pursuit of fame and fortune than the pursuit of truth and beauty. Enough of them get what they want, but I wonder whom among our celebrity pantheon will be remembered a century from now and what obscure figures living among us will be venerated as gods when this generation has at last been laid to waste. More often than that I wonder whether there will be a generation a hundred years from now to wonder about us. Our libraries and copy machines and online file archives might provide the most secure measure against the obliteration of culture, they have coincided with measures that facilitate the obliteration of the entire planet. Who, then, can blame those that seek adoration in the here and now.

I make jokes about being content with being famous after death. Perhaps I should stop. Perhaps it makes it too easy to wait until procrastinate until that deadline is around the corner. I remember the day that I realized I was too old to be known as a child prodigy. I find myself thinking that the best I could hope for would be to be known as the Socrates of my time, or maybe the Neal Cassidy--the guy who might have said a few clever things that someone else happened to write down. That is a hubristic desire, to be famous for your words without writing them down. After all, millions of people do worship a man who fits that description.

So I won't put my name next to those mentioned or alluded to above. I can put my name among those whose works were lost to the ages. A diary and a stack of unsent love letters mysteriously disappeared from by bedroom closet when I was a teenager, and showed up in my parents' bedroom closet some time later. I took them back to my room, where they disappeared again for good. I lost about one hundred pages of a novel when I moved after college and everything that I had written in the three years prior during a milk/laptop computer collision. I left a notebook of my poems in a taxicab in New York City, another phenomenon that seems common, like the tendency to forget whether famous people are dead yet; perhaps it too is a coping mechanism, a subconscious way of taking away the security blanket. The only real loss wasn't even my own work. The laptop contained a three-page document called "bee" that my cat, Porkchop, somehow managed to compose and save. I can only approximate a brief excerpt of its genius here: "llkkkk;tylklddddddddklzxbnhgj"

I can't let myself worry about whether what I write will stand the test of time. I have enough problems making sure that hard drives don't fail and discs don't get scratched before I can print an assignment sheet before class. I don't worry about being famous much at all. Watching the Tom and Katie wedding coverage and talking to Lecy Gorensen makes it plainly obvious what a pain in the ass the public eye can be. Famous writers have it pretty easy, at least when it comes to maintaining privacy. No actor, of course, could be a recluse to the extent of a Pynchon or a Salinger, who can or could get away without being photographed and without being recognized. Think of the trouble the well-recognized recluse has going out in public. My friend Joss had an encounter with Michael Jackson that features the Man in the Mirror in a burkah.

She tells the story so much better of course. I hope she writes it down.

It may be true that everyone has a book in them. They might not necessarily all be good books, but many I am sure would be better than many of the ones out there now. It stands to reason that the pursuit of recognition over some artistic ideal has contributed greatly to the sorry state of most literature these days. The McSweeney's crowd has coasted too long on hipness and seems to have spent more time considering what typeface to use than whether they've written anything worth reading. Which reminds me--I have some thinking to do.

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