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