Thursday, September 10

"The Monstrous Work of Evolution"

"Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him on the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned: -Introibo ad altare Dei. Halted, he peered down the dark winding stairs and called out coarsely: -Come up, Kinch! Come up, you fearful jesuit! Solemnly he came forward and mounted the round gunrest. He faced about and blessed gravely thrice the tower, the surrounding land and the awaking mountains. Then, catching sight of Stephen Dedalus, he bent towards him and made rapid crosses in the air, gurgling in his throat and shaking his head..." to finish the first page click here

Brian Boyd's intro to Speak, Memory:
http://www.randomhouse.com/features/nabokov/speak.html

Nabokov on Lolita:


'Liberal Imagination' by Lionel Trilling

Christopher Plummer as Nabokov:

To truly read Nabokov you must realize that he has full the "masterful art of telling lies", so you cannot believe a word he says

"There is no truth, only creative nonfiction" ~Dr. S

'The decay of lying' by Oscar Wilde

"You never finish a paper, you abandon it" ~Dr. S

John Updike's 'Good Readers and Good Writers' need to:

1. Join a book club
2. identify with a hero
3. look at things from a social economic angle
4. action and dialogue
5. see the movie and read the book
6. write
7. have a great imagination
8. use their memory
9. dictionary
10. artistic sense

*most important in bold

a REREADER is the best reader!

Nabokov wants you to experience the 'sob of the spine' "you don't read a great piece of literature with your heart or your mind, but with your spine"

He plays many games with his readers to help this occur

Good Readers, Good Writers:

• "The precision of poetry and the intuition of the scientist" ~VN
• "The sullen reader and the sunny book"

The 3 things a writer should be:

1. storyteller
2. teacher
3. enchanter: 'the return' is the most important to this part

He referred to himself as the "master puppeteer"

"The artist is a god-like presence in the book" ~Dr. S

Chris' blog: intro to speak, memory

Brian Boyd

Charles Darwin 'origin of species'

"We need stories more than we need bridges" ~Dr S

Timelessness: butterflies for Nabokov, nymphets for Humbert

"After making my way through some pine groves and alder scrub I came to the bog. No sooner had my ear caught the hum of diptera around me, the guttural cry of a snipe overhead, the gulping sound of hte moraa under my foot, than I knew I would find here quite special arctic butterflies, whose pictures, or, still better, nonillustrated descriptions I had worshiped for several seasons. And the next moment I was among them. Over the small shrubs of bog bilberry with fruit of a dim, dreamy blue, over the brown eye of stagnant water, over moss and mire, over the flower spikes of the fragrant bog orchid (the nochnaya fialka of Russian poets), a dusky little Fritillary bearing the name of a Norse goddess passed in low, skimming flight. Pretty Cordigera, a gemlike moth, buzzed all over its uliginose food plant. I pursued rose-margined Sulphurs, gray-marbled Satyrs. Unmindful of the mosquitoes that furred my forearms, I stooped with a grunt of delight to snuff out the life of some silver-studded legidopteron throbbing in the folds of my net. Through the smells of the bog, I caught the subtle perfume of butterfly wings on my fingers, a perfume which varies with the species- vanilla, or lemon, or musk, or a musty, sweetish odor difficult to define. Still unsated, I pressed forward. At last I saw I had come to the end of the marsh. The rising ground beyond was a paradise of lupines, columbines, and pentstemons. Mariposa lilies bloomed under Ponderosa pines. In the distance, fleeting cloud shadows dappled the dull green of slopes about timber line, and the gray and white of Longs Peak.
I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness- in a landscape selected at random- is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind The ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern- to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal" ~Speak, Memory pg 139

'I'm not history, I'm mythology' ~The Genie


POE:

• The Kingdom by the sea~ Annabelle Lee
  
• The Raven

"The act of putting something into words is a discovery" ~ Dr. S



Kasbeam barber: pg 213
"In Kasbeam a very old barber gave me a mediocre haircut: he babbled of a baseball-playing son of his, and, at every exlodent, spat into my neck, and every now and then wiped his glasses on my sheet-wrap, or interrupted his tremulous scissor work to produce faded newspaper clippings, and so inattentive was I that it came as a shock to realize as he pointed to an easeled photograph among the ancient gray lotions, that the mustached young ball player had been dead for the last thirty years."

Randomness:

• Pathos: emotions
• STYLE IS MATTER
• 'In remembrance of things past' ~Proust
• Shakespeare's Sonnet 30
• Perfume: the story of a murderer: film, book
• The Collector

Tuesday, September 8

"Call me Columbus, I'm here to discover"

DON'T FORGET TO ADD A COMMONPLACE BOOK TO YOUR BLOG!

Group Projects: an act of discovery in Nabokov

they must be:

• informative
• and extra, super enjoyable

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

observant: look and note things that you wouldn't usually see

The plague of Nabokoviana: unconscious use of adjectives to explain things

2 types of sentences:

1. it does the job of communicating what needs to be communicated
2. it is enjoyable, pleasurable and is 'art for arts sake' (this is a Nabokovian sentence)

Magician:

• magic carpet
• trick
• slight of hand

The act of discovery is really important in Nabokov's novels too, and in reading in general, this is why movies aren't as great as novels. They dumb it down too much, and give too much away up front (this is not always true of course, I'm an avid movie watcher and would be an idiot if this was always true, it's just a gross generalization)

Childlike discovery is also vital to life and Nabokov

Books that put you to sleep:

• The bible
• some of Shakespeare
• Homer
• but NEVER Nabokov ;)

Lolita, part 2:

• a 'road novel' about travelling
• parody: a game (this is what VN is all about)
• not a satire!
• a great American novel, the only difference between Humbert and Nabokov was that HH travelled with his beloved nymphet, while VN travelled with his beloved butterflies

Sam, our resident class genius (yeah Sam!), figured out the code on pg 70 of Speak, Memory: 5.13 24.11 13.16 9.13.5 5.13 24.11 = 'To be or not to be' from Hamlet

Codes:

• the da vinci code uses every literary trick in the book, therefore, making it ridiculous instead of important "Dan Brown... not so much" ~Dr S
• The Alchemist: a good book? no again, you like the idea of the book, but not the book its self
• The Origins of Stories by Brian Boyd
• Haroun and the Sea of stories: "what are the purpose of stories that aren't even true?"

"These are the great pleasures, not the pleasures you get from Perkins Restaurant" ~Dr S

"great cosmic pranksters/ trickster figures"

"Don't put a stumbling block in front of a blind person" ~ Dr. S

"You don't mind being called stupid, do you? Especially if you are stupid" ~Dr S

The word 'real' is the only word that should be put in quotations

Anagrams:

• John Ray Jr= Jr Jr
• Vivian Darkbloom= Vladimir Nabokov
• everyone in the class list is an anagram for everyone else

Albert A Appel is a "demonic puppet master"

synaesthete: mixing of the senses

aesthete

" I discovered in nature the nonutilitarian delights that I sought in art. Both were a form of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and deception" ~Speak, Memory pg 125

Here's Vlady:

Thursday, September 3

"The Land of Nabokoviana"


"This semester we will only be civilly rude" to each other ~Dr. S


Wiki links to key terms:

• butterflies
• Nabokov
• Lewis Carroll
• Chess

Vlady's major novels (written in English):

• The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
• Bend Sinister
• Lolita
• Pnin
• Pale Fire
• Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle
• Transparent Things
• Look at the Harlequins!
• The Original of Laura

"Probing your childhood is the next best thing to probing eternity" ~Nabokov

Blog Assignment #2: reproduce a photo of an earlier time in your life and do a 'Nabokovian' commentary on it

'The Sound and the Fury' by Faulkner came from Macbeth: "out, out brief candle. Life is but a walking shadow a poor player that frets and struts his hour upon the stage and is heard no more, it is a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury, signifying nothing"

Nabokov's favorite memories are those of pure experience and labelless joy

Adam and Eve and the knowledge of good and evil [photo by William Blake btw]

"but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die." Genesis 2:17

"Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves." Genesis 3:7

The first lines of Speak, Memory: "The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats and hour)."

Nabokov is obsessed with identical twins, there are 4 in the Ramsdale class list

Doppelgangers:

• Dungeons and Dragons
• Steven King
• Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor
• Edgar Allen Poe's 'William Wilson'
• The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
• etc

nymphette: coined by Vlad

"It will be marked that I substitute time terms for spatial ones. In fact, I would have the reader see "nine" and "fourteen" as the boundaries- the mirrory beaches and rosy rocks- of an enchanted island haunted by those nymphettes of mine and surrounded by a vast, misty sea. Between those age limits, are all girl-children nymphets? Of course not. Otherwise, we who are in the know, we lone voyagers, we are nympholepts, would have long gone insane. Neither are good looks any criterion; and vulgarity, or at least what a given community terms so, does not necessarily impair certain mysterious characteristics, the fey grace, the elusive, shifty, soul-shattering, insidious charm that separates the nymphet from such coevals of hers as are incomparably more dependent on the spatial world of synchronous phenomena than on that intangible island of entranced time where Lolita plays with her likes. Within the same age limits the number of true nymphets is strikingly inferior to that of provisionally plain, or just nice, or "cute," or even "sweet" and "attractive," ordinarily, plumpish, formless, cold-skinned, essentially human little girls, with tummies and pigtails, who may or may not turn into adults of great beauty (look at the ugly dumplings in black stockings and white hats that are metamorphosed into stunning stars of the screen). A normal man given a group photograph of school girls or Girl Scouts and asked to point out the comeliest one will not necessarily choose the nymphet among them. You have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy, with a bubble of hot poison in your loins and a super-voluptuous flame permanently aglow in your subtle spine... Furthermore, since the idea of time plays such a magic part in the matter, the student should not be surprised to learn that there must be a gap of several years, never less than ten I should say, generally thirty or forty, as many as ninety in a few known cases, between maiden and a man to enable the latter to come under a nymphet's spell." (page 16-7)

The first sentences of Lolita changed Dr. S's life: not making him into a sexual predator, but into a true reader of literature "Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita." (pg 9)

Although Dr. S's lines are mighty fine, my absolute favorite line in the entire novel is: "You see I loved her, it was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever site." It is so beautiful that I forget it's wrong, evil, horrible; and just get caught up in the beauty of the words.

"Words themselves as agents of enlightenment [bring] ecstasy" ~Dr S

"Seldom does a casual snapshot compendiate a life so precisely" ~ Nabokov pg 257

ASSIGNMENT FOR THE ADORATION OF DR S: memorize the first lines of Speak, Memory

cronophobia: panic at looking at home movies that take place before you were born

Dr S as Vlad: " I have tried so hard to make these novels enjoyable to you on so many levels, be nice to me! "

Tuesday, September 1

Class List:

I'm not sure if this is the passage that Dr. S read on the first day of class, but it is one of my favorites from the essay at the end:

"There are gentle souls who would pronounce Lolita meaningless because it does not teach them anything. I am neither a reader nor a writer of didactic fiction and, despite John Ray's assertion, Lolita has no moral in tow. For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm. There are not many such books. All the rest is either topical trash or what some call the Literature of the Ideas, which very often is topical trash coming in huge blocks of plaster that are carefully transmitted from age to age until somebody comes along with a hammer and takes a good crack at Balzac, at Gorki, at Mann." (pg 315)

On our class list: "for sooth, a poem" ~Dr. S

WARNING: In this class you will experience/ discover:

• spine thrills
• "coincidences that poets love and logicians loath"
• 'art for art's sake' only exists to give you ecstasy
• that Darwin was wrong, butterflies are not only nature's deceivers, they also exist for pure art
• " There is no truth, only memory" ~Dr. S
• mimicry: butterflies and truth
• lepidopterology: the study of butterflies
• The marriage of science and art are in Lolita
• Butterfly: psyche and soul
• correct pronunciation: nabOkov
• the recollection of time and memory
• Nabokov: not only a writer, but more importantly a LITERARY STYLIST, not to be confused with a hair stylist "style is matter"

First blog entry: Probe your childhood for your first memory

A Nabokovian photo from the past....

This is a picture of my cousins and I (clockwise from left: me, Lindsey, Heather and Jennifer) on a swing set at their house in Vancouver, Wa. As you can tell from our attire and bangs that start in the middle of our heads, it is sometime in the early 90's. I always loved staying with them because we hardly ever saw them when I was very young, and they had a goat that would roam the backyard and terrorise us. He was a mean little pygmy that would always bite our hair and pants, my mom was always furious because my younger sister and I would come home with holes in the butt of all of my pants, but I always had the most fun there. It was shortly after this that my Aunt and Uncle went to 'college' (it was actually Sheridan Prison) and my 3 cousins came to live with us for almost a month. During this time, and throughout the next few years we all lived as sisters and did everything together. Neither of my sisters are shown in this photo, which actually speaks to our relationships at the time. I got along with my cousins much better during my youth than I did with my sisters and brother, and it wasn't until a few years ago that this changed. I now rarely talk to my cousins, but talk to my sisters almost everyday. This was definitely a better time for the relationships shown in the picture, and much has changed since then both in my life and theirs. We have drifted apart over the years and perhaps it is our relationships and not only our youths that have died since this picture was taken. Although this saddens me, there is also a joy, not for cousins lost, but for sisters gained.

My First Memory

I was 4 or 5, my sister was 1 or 2, and we were sitting on the floor in the living room playing with our brand new puppy, a black cocker spaniel. My dad was watching tv, my mom was in the kitchen. We were all brainstorming names for him, my mom yelled 'blackie' (this is what she calls all black animals, btw) and my dad said something silly like licorice to make us laugh. I said "broccoli," it was my new favorite word and I felt that it was the perfect name for him. My parents both laughed, like it was a joke. I got mad and started screaming "BROCCOLI, BROCCOLI, BROCCOLI" at the top of my lungs, my sister started to clap along. It was during this fit that our new puppy walked to the door and peed into my dads new shoe. Thus the name Shoey was born.