Paradoxes of self

My review of Lawrence Douglas's excellent novel The Vices—and my consideration of Lars Arffssen's parody, The Girl With the Sturgeon Tattoo—is now up at Bookforum:

Our narrator is so fluently revealing, even as he peppers his conversation with white lies, that it's a shock to realize that we never learn his name. Is he, in fact, not so much a narrator as a narrative device, a way to tell The Real Life of Oliver Vice? Douglas, or his surrogate, creates exceptionally memorable set pieces: a lust-and-magic-ridden party in commemoration of Beggars Banquet; a Christmas dinner in New York with Oliver's bewitching mother and corpulent, Churchill-worshipping brother. And though the novelist has a seamless voice, he allows other characters to reach us, unfiltered, via their correspondence. Oliver's frequent missives from abroad have the bitter-hilarious tang of a Thomas Bernhard rant:

But her apartment stinks of cigarettes, and I can't stand being there—the odor is so vile, it makes me physically ill. But here's the catch. The cigarette odor in S.'s studio is no different from the smell in my mother's apartment, which has never bothered me. In fact, I would go so far as to say that I find the smell in my mother's apartment pleasing.

Even more impressive are the glimpses of Oliver's masterpiece, the Wittgensteinian treatise Paradoxes of Self. It's one thing for a novelist to invent a genius-author character; it's another order of difficulty to include excerpts of said genius's work that are brilliant enough to convince us of the character's literary chops. The five pages of Paradoxes of Self that Douglas presents—i.e., writes—are so good that you'll wish the book existed in full, on the shelf.

Pole position

Levi quotes my favorite bit from the letters Nabokov wrote to Véra (printed in a recent New Yorker) while he was on a college lecture tour in 1942.

At the station in Springfield I was met . . . by the club secretary, a creepily silent melancholic of somewhat clerical cast with a small stock of automatic questions, which he quickly exhausted. He is an elderly bachelor, and his profession consists of doing secretarial work for several Springfield clubs. He livened up and flashed his eyes one single time--got awfully nervous, having noticed that the flagpole by the Lincoln mausoleum had been replaced by a new, taller one. It turned out that his hobby--or, rather, the passion of his life--is flagpoles. He sighed with relief when a watchman gave him the exact information--seventy feet--because the pole in his own garden is still ten feet taller.

The chills

All we have to do when reading Bleak House is to relax and let our spines take over. Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. That little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and pure science. Let us worship the spine and its tingle. Let us be proud of our being vertebrates, for we are vertebrates tipped at the head with a divine flame. The brain only continues the spine: the wick really goes through the whole length of the candle. If we are not capable of enjoying that shiver, if we cannot enjoy literature, then let us give up the whole thing and concentrate on our comics, our videos, our books-of-the-week. But I think Dickens will prove stronger. —Nabokov, Lectures on Literature

(I happened to read the foregoing after a few days of being deeply immersed in the following:)


NewVillager, "LightHouse":

NewVillager - "LightHouse" from stereogum on Vimeo.

Things That Make You Go Hmmm, Vol. 54

Nabokov's sister and Ayn Rand were school friends.

Dan Brown and David Foster Wallace were in the same creative writing class in college.

Ursula K. LeGuin and Philip K. Dick went to the same high school.

When Andre the Giant was 12, Samuel Beckett drove him to school.
(This last one via James Hynes)

Memo to myself

To read later in the week/month:

I. At Guernica—Updike on Nabokov.

II. At the U. Chicago site—puns in Sanskrit.

UPDATE: This just in (via Maud & elsewhere)—Nabokov's letters to his wife, Véra, to be published (in The Snob [??] and later by Knopf).

Now *That's* a First Paragraph!™

The huge black clock hand is still at rest but is on the point of making its once-a-minute gesture; that resilient jolt will set a whole world in motion. The clock face will slowly turn away, full of despair, contempt, and boredom, as one by one the iron pillars will start walking past, bearing away the vault of the station like bland atlantes; the platform will begin to move past, carrying off on an unknown journey cigarette butts, used tickets, flecks of sunlight and spittle; a luggage handcart will glide by, its wheels motionless; it will be followed by a news stall hung with seductive magazine covers—photographs of naked, pearl-gray beauties; and people, people, people on the moving platforms, themselves moving their feet, yet standing still, striding forward, yet retreating as in an agonizing dream full of incredible effort, nausea, a cottony weakness in one's calves, will surge back, almost falling supine. —Nabokov, King, Queen, Knave

Inversions

John Deming's piece "Salinger's Poets" includes a bit from his novella The Inverted Forest, about a fictional poet named Raymond Ford:

“I have such nice friends,” she told him enthusiastically. “They all know your poetry. Some even live on it.”

“Corinne, I don’t mix too well–”

Corinne leaned forward joyfully, remembering something.

“That’s what Miss Aigletinger once yelled about you into my father’s thing. Do you remember Miss Aigletinger?”

Ford nodded unnostalgically. “What would I have to do if I met them?” he asked.

(from Travis)

* * *

Steve Hely: "It's a sad day for readers. Every adolescent goes through a Louis Auchincloss phase."

* * *

From the Parkives: J.D. Salinger, Author of...Lolita?

My Kinbote moment

Q: Was I indirectly responsible for the publication of Nabokov's The Original of Laura?

A: Leland de la Durantaye just sent me a link to a recent WBUR show, on which he and Brian Boyd (VN's biographer) talked about TOOL. LDLD reminded me that Ron Rosenbaum (the chief advocate for publishing TOOL vs. burning it, as VN had wished) first picked up the scent thanks to Leland's essay on Lolita at 50, which he wrote for me back at the PTSNBN (9/6/05). (I bestowed the headline "The Original of Lolita"—pas mal!)

Here was Ron Rosenbaum, in the New York Observer (11/27/05):

I’m ashamed to admit it, but I didn’t know of the existence of The Original of Laura until very recently, when I learned about its peril. I only came upon reference to it as I was thinking of writing about a surprising new disclosure in the German scholar Michael Maar’s new book, The Two Lolitas. I’d written about Maar’s “cryptomnesia” theory—which attempts to connect a 1916 German story called “Lolita” with Nabokov’s 1955 Lolita—in the April 19, 2004, issue of The Observer, when his essay was initially published in English in London’s TLS. But the new book takes a new turn. And as I was Googling to see whether anyone had seen the significance of Maar’s “Atomite”* discovery, I came across an essay by Harvard professor Leland de la Durantaye on Lolita in The Village Voice, in which he mentions the existence of The Original of Laura: “When Nabokov died in 1977, he left behind an unfinished novel entitled The Original of Laura. His express wish was that it be destroyed upon his death. Before him, Virgil and Kafka had left similar instructions [to destroy their work]; neither was obeyed. Nor was Nabokov. His wife, Véra, found herself unable to carry out her late husband’s wishes, and when she passed away in 1991 she bequeathed the decision to their son. The manuscript’s location is kept secret.”

I still haven't read it! (I don't even own it!) I'm trying not to read reviews of it for now...

Changing the game

Paper Cuts on Ron Rosenbaum on Nabokov as game changer:

[In Slate] Rosenbaum wrote:

I have my own strong feelings about the question of genius in literature. I’ve always felt that if we look at the past century, Nabokov was a game-changer, as the academic phrase has it. Nabokov showed there is a place you can go, a place that the alchemy of words can transport reader and writer to, that no one had gone before. And Nabokov went there, with ease, in “Lolita” and “Pale Fire.” So it’s hard to call any other writer in the past century a genius of the same order.

Really? I guess it’s time to push Proust out of the pantheon and kick Kafka to the curb.

And yet...I think R.R. is right!? (At 2 in the morning.)

(Am not going to read his Slate piece on The Orig. of Laura, though, b/c I want to come to it "fresh.")

Box tops

At the new book design blog Spine Out...too much good stuff! Check out these natty new Nabokov covers:




(From Gautam!)

Disambiguations for July 22, 2009

I. Over at Driftwood Singers Present:

Remember when your whole M.O. was to avoid living a life of "quiet desperation"? Books and music were going to save us. By the time you realize your liberal arts education was designed to fulfill the self-indulgent solipsism of youth, you've become a "content provider" scraping for a shred of dignity in the digital age. How poetic! Then one day you wake up and find yourself on your knees on the sidewalk flipping through boxes of crappy $1 vinyl like some vagrant off his meds: Hey, maybe this Strawbs album will be good. Pathetic. (Btw, it's horrible.)

II. A little oeuvre sleuthing over at Paper Cuts, on Nabokov and Lolita:

Nabokov himself may well have deplored this combing of his work for clues to his life, or vice versa. The alchemy between the two was among his great subjects, and even in this memoir (subtitled, significantly, “An Autobiography Revisited“) he suggests there can be no literal translation from life to literature. But he wasn’t averse to leaving a trail of bread crumbs; indeed, he left so many of them that his books sometimes seem like solid loaves of hints and puzzles.

(Solid loaves! Very funny.)

III. Re-reading around the edges: Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections. This book is TOO GOOD. I can't write about it here.

IV. The Believer music issue is also TOO GOOD to be blogged about..................I'll just say GO GET IT.......then tell me which song you liked best on the CD. (The CD is really good but there is one song in particular that is TOO GOOD to be blogged about.)

V. Why is "The Dizzies" now called "Disambiguation"? (For that matter, why was it briefly "As I Please"?) These questions are TOO MYSTERIOUS to be blogged about.

VI. Laird Hunt has an original take on the Living With Music playlist-format at Paper Cuts. Example:

6) Inflammatory Writ, Joanna Newsom. “Oh, where is your inflammatory writ? Your text that would incite a light, ‘Be lit’ ?” “The Exquisite” was, I’d like to hope, my inflammatory writ.

“Ray of the Star”: Written in one mad six-week sprint during the fall of 2007 after a visit to La Rambla in Barcelona, where the most elaborate living statues coexist with newspaper stands, flower stalls, bird vendors, locals and tourists. My fever-dream version of Barcelona includes bathing ghosts, haunted shoes, bargains with devils and demonic art critics.

Love that he ends with Sonic Youth's "Providence." (Secret source for the Psychic Envelopes "Providence #3?). Mix idea: Songs with/mentioning/utilizing answering machines/their ingoing/outgoing messages...Replacements, "Answering Machine"...that weird tidbit at the end of one of those early TMBG singles/EPs...uh...the list goes on...

VII. Am very late on this: Joshua Glenn and Rob Walker's Significant Objects project...I have written something for it (not posted yet)...More info at Paper Cuts (your one-stop shop for Disambiguation fodder)....also more at Jacket Copy.

VIII. On Sung J. Woo's site: Photos from the 7/1 Korea Society panel.

The seventh word

TREADING THE SOIL OF THE MOON PALPATING ITS PEBBLES TASTING THE PANIC AND SPLENDOR OF THE EVENT FEELING IN THE PIT OF ONES STOMACH THE SEPARATION FROM TERRA THESE FORM THE MOST ROMANTIC SENSATION AN EXPLORER HAS EVER KNOWN

—Answer cabled (7/3/69) by Nabokov for publication in the NYT; published "with a disastrous misprint in the seventh word" (published in Strong Opinions)

Londoners! Invisible Library to disappear soon...

Some nice pics of people scribbling in the Invisible Library are up at Londonist. And here's what the site has to say:

Sometimes we hear of an idea that's so brilliantly simple, we wonder why nobody's tried it before. And so it is with the Invisible Library exhibition at Tenderpixel on Cecil Court. The illustration collective INK have chosen 40 books that don't exist in the real world - only within the pages of other, real-world books - and brought them to life by illustrating their covers.

But it doesn't stop there. These books are unwritten, apart from the opening or closing pages, and you're invited to go in and add to their stories. The exhibition's already been running for several weeks so if your creative juices aren't running, you can always read what others have done (we recommend taking a look at Oolon Colluphid's "Who is This God Person, Anyway?", part of which has been filled in by someone who's clearly never read any Douglas Adams). Other fake works come from Roberto Bolano, John Wyndham and Vladimir Nabokov.

Invisible Library runs until 11 July at Tendepixel, 10 Cecil Court WC2N. Gallery open Tuesday-Saturday 10.30am-7pm. For more information, visit Tenderpixel or INK Illustration's websites.

Who would win???

The upcoming Nabokov book's subtitle vs. M*A*S*H's theme song—who would win???

(Thanks to Gautam for the VN link)

Table-Talk of Parkus Grammaticus for January 26, 2009

I. "I think that the whole world of Kafka is to be found in a far more complex way in the stories of Henry James." —Borges interview, The Paris Review
(Via.)

II. L.G. Thos. sends this "keen observation by John Banville": "Who but Nabokov would invent a villain with an x in each of his names?"

Dzyd trivia: Name that villain!

III. Supplementary VN trivia from me: What VN book, turned into a film with Anna Karina, interestingly features a character named Dorianna Karenina?

IV. Most of the stories in Stephen King's Night Shift were originally published in Cavalier (?). Two (including "Children of the Corn") were published in Penthouse. One story appeared in Cosmopolitan, another in Maine (?), and another in Gallery (?).

Hammett, Nabokov, Rabe: An Eternal Golden Braid

We know Westlake was a Powell fan...here's another somewhat unexpected influence:

THIS WAS A VERY early novel, and the first one in which I did any experimenting. There were writers I admired -- Dashiell Hammett, Vladimir Nabokov, Peter Rabe -- who could do something I very much envied, which was to make you feel the emotion in a scene without ever referring to it directly. It all roils below the surface while the surface remains apparently calm. In 361, I set out to learn if I could do that. I enjoyed the process and enjoyed the result, and I find I still do. I'm delighted to see it back in print. (from Donald Westlake's website.)

Clearly I need to get this book ASAP! Here's chapter one. (I've just finished The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, which I hadn't read since 1992!)

(I don't know who Peter Rabe is.)

The invisible article...revealed!

My latest Astral Weeks column is finally up! Ostensibly a review of a book by Jack McDevitt, I also pay a visit to the Invisible Library. Here is the tantalizing beginning!

Earlier this year, with a like-minded bibliophile, I started yet another blog. The blog, called Invisible Library, would list books by fictional authors -- that is, titles that don't exist outside the pages of fiction.

Up went the novels by the titular author of Nabokov's "The Real Life of Sebastian Knight," the wildly varied subjects of Stanislaw Lem's "A Perfect Vacuum" (a collection of fake book reviews), the quartet of stories attributable to a Cheeveresque author in Cheever's sly anti-Cheever "A Miscellany of Characters That Will Not Appear."

From Nabokov's Lectures on Russian Literature

Chekhov's books are sad books for humorous people; that is, only a reader with a sense of humor can really appreciate their sadness....Things for him were funny and sad at the same time, but you would not see their sadness if you did not see their fun, because both were linked up.

• • •

His dictionary is poor, his combination of words almost trivial....he was not a verbal inventor in the sense that Gogol was; his literary style goes to parties clad in its everyday suit. Thus Chekhov is a good example to give when one tries to explain that a writer may be a perfect artist without being exceptionally vivid in his verbal technique or exceptionally preoccupied with the way his sentences curve.

An IV-VI Bloodmark

Not sure why this came up on my Gmail—but it's interesting, a Wii thing for your guitar. I wouldn't post it here...except that the guitarist's band is called Vivian Darkbloom! (And they have a song called "Saved by Science Fiction.")

Frazzled, efficient

Really Good Short Story

Chris Adrian's "Why Antichrist?," in his new collection, A Better Angel. I can't even describe it. It is too great.

Claire Barliant...

...has a website.

Don DeLillo...

...blogger? At The Onion, "D.D." on the Republican National Convention:

Here in Minneapolis, a woman with a clipboard, frazzled, efficient. She reads from a printout to a group of staffers a change in schedule from the coordinating committee: the station wagons arrive at noon. In the Free Speech Zone, a man dangles from a wire, the famous performance artist from New York. Everywhere, security: badges, metal detectors, small plastic cards with magnetic stripes. Police, silent in riot gear, truncheons like humming, efficient software. Someone says: "So she was technically never the actual Miss Alaska?"

Refreshments

"If anyone has the blues over the hard times and trembles for the present and future prosperity of the United States let him make a tour of the great shops of the city on one of these bright and deliciously cool September days, and however deeply financial pessimism may have crept into his soul he will experience of refreshment and will become firmly convinced that all hope is not yet lost." —The New York Herald, 1893

(Via MUG, quoted from Gilded City, by M. H. Dunlop)

What if she had said 'The Believer'?

The History of Literature

There's Joyce, Nabokov, and then nothing for a while...oh and then Park. Heyyy—I'll take it!!!

Portland Bulletin

Dzyds Paul and Deb and others read tonight at The Cleaners!