Finally.

I think I've settled in on a blog title (except perhaps for the punctuation, which I'm still fucking around with). And I found a way to worship Nabokov with it!

Conclusive Evidence was the title of his (mesmerizing) memoir for the first 15 years of its existence. After Lolita and Pale Fire and most of his other famous novels came out, his publisher issued a slightly updated version under the grossly inferior title "Speak, Memory." He explains in the foreward that the original "had suggested a mystery story"--it's not clear whether booksellers were stocking it in the wrong section of the store, or readers were brushing by what they took for pulp fiction.

He should have let them search. He also explains in the foreward what the title actually referred to: "conclusive evidence of my having existed." Until I read that line I was merely in awe of Nabokov; since that moment I've been hopelessly in love.

That may be puzzling to you if you're not a writer. I've retold the little anecdote about the title change countless times, and the reaction has been pretty universal. "Huh." Except for the writers. If you really want to see a writer's heart break, just tell him that story. Do it in person and you can see them watch the whole essence of their existence sail before their eyes. God must have designed writers with a missing feature dug out of our souls. We're fascinated by the (performance) of this world all around us, yet we never seem fully capable of perceiving our place inside it--or believing it?

Oh, what am I trying to explain it for? Never works, does it. The life that he lived didn't feel like the true measure of his life, the story he told about it was the only thing that did. Every now and then I catch a fuller glimpse of who I am and what I'm doing here, and the brightest flash I've witnessed in my first 42 years came when I read that line. (In a Foreward of all places!--I never read that useless twaddle, awkwardly epoxied to otherwise luminous works of art.)

So I stole someone else's title again--my previous attempt was "The World According to Dave (Cullen)"--a somewhat inferior literary patriarch, but an equally transformative phrase for my life: less about what my life is than how I could live it. I figured this one was up for grabs when he threw in the trash heap, though.

But my concern isn't really about rights to the material, is it? I'm tormented by the notion that the one phrase I choose to embody who I am and what I'm doing inevitably turns out to be a phrase I failed to invent myself. What could be scarier for a writer: So freaking derivative, even the title of his life was written by somebody else. For now, I comfort myself with the illusion that I'm still getting started (I didn't go to writing school till I was 35; my first real break didn't come till 38, when Joan Walsh first took a chance on me at Salon. And do yourself a favor: any time you see her byline, click on the story, no matter how unarousing the topic; you'll thank yourself when you finish reading). Just starting on the writing, and only mid-way through the living. For now I'll comfort myself with the rationalization that I can't be expected to learn the title for my life until I've completed living it. (Or at least make my way into the denouement. There I got to use it! Love that word, though I can never say it out loud without feeling pretentious, so I still have to pronounce it de-NOO-ment, which never fails to give me a little chuckle, for reasons I can't explain. I just love the sound of it--both versions of it: the mellifluous elegance of the French version (it will always be frenchie to me, in spite of its coversion directly to Middle English from Latin) vs. the goofy baritone of the homegrown version, which I imagine thundering out of a tuba lodged mysteriously in the body of an malnourished carny worker plotting how to run off with cotton candy. Scenes like that pass before me everytime I hear the word, so naturally I have to chuckle, sometimes at the most inappropriate moments. (And since the type of person reaching for that word typically is afflicted by a few pretentions, they tend to look unkindly on my reaction to their artistic assessment just then approaching its own denooment.)

Where was I? Yeah, by the time it's time to compose my autobiography, I need to come up with an original title. So I've got 30 more years to fret about it, and in the meantime I'm allowed--even expected to steal them from my heros. And it's not theft, it's homage.

I had no idea none of the pix on my site were showing up. That was half the fun, for me. And they looked great on my PC, but there was no indication they weren't upstreaming. I figured it out.

(Though it was kind of annoying to do a search of the RadioUserland site and find a discussion from last August that the tool for uploading pix set up the wrong destination folder so it didn't work--and yet I downloaded the software three days ago and they were still providing the bad setup; and not even a note to tell you to change it. It was easily user-fixable, but no indication to the user. This software seems pretty easy to use, but the documentation provided is barely existent. The funny part is that I'm discovering that they have lots of documentation out there on their site, but they never tell you it's there or where to look for it. I had to plow through pages and pages of unrelated crap on their problem-discussion board to stumble into a notice about where to find a search feature at their site. Freaking annoying.)

Anyway, the pix should all be loaded now, except inside the Columbine Almanac. I'll try to get to that tomorrow.