Oh, god, Nabokov and blank verse! Here it is. I suppose I'm posting it here mostly for safe-keeping, things get lost in my computer files and bookmarks ( Read more... )

I'm reading Byatt's Possession, quite illicitly, alongside law. In it, two of the literature scholars discuss why they've come to study the poets Lamotte and Ash, respectively, and conclude that they are 'what survived our educations'. It has stuck with me. So far Austen has fallen to my education, Shakespeare might be gravely wounded (though I ( Read more... )

Could really be good at this hermit thing I've got going. I read (currently more Bolaño than American History), eat, drink litres of water, play some PS3, play with the monster dog, post the occasional update on Facebook on my lack of academic prowess, eat some more. And I have a face mask I need to get rid of, so by the end of the exam period, I' ( Read more... )

I ordered Nabokov's The Original of Laura on Sunday, and can't wait to open it. (If someone doesn't yet know, I'm a 'Nabokovian', sworn on pain of death). He is, I've reasoned, my adult Roald Dahl: articulate, wry, dark. My brother wasn't as taken by him, but we both gleefully read the passage where George gets rid of his grandmother to ours. Hold ( Read more... )

'And the rest is rust and stardust' (Lolita, chapter 25), read that out loud. The repetition of the /s/ sound is what makes it so pleasing to listen to. That is Nabokov's genius. The sentence makes perfect sense and sounds unearthly ( Read more... )

I cannot keep track of my favourites for the life of me, so, as I scourge the web for information on my delightful Russian, I keep them here:

On his memoirs, Speak, Memory (then "Conclusive Evidence").
Why he detested Freud, and his imagined audience.
Partly on the writing process.
The Old Magician at Home
Transparent ThingsMost of these are ( Read more... )

When I've read Joyce (the plan is Dubliners, perhaps A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and eventually Ulysses), the volumes in my "un-read shelf" and fulfilled my promise to dad by reading Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell, I think I shall make it my new literary project to read the works Nabokov discusses in Lectures on Russian Literature and ( Read more... )

There are writers, authors, and there are artists. There are those who write only to tell a story, prove a point or institute political havoc, and there are those that care not only for the story, the havoc or the point, but for the means by which it is told/intimated; the language. There are those that deem a day devoted to pondering the placement ( Read more... )

I've read Nabokov, and now I'm moving on to "Bleak House" and Dickens. "Laughter in the Dark" or "Kamera Obskura" is entertaining at times (particularly when he brings out the "Nabokovian parenthesis"), but too early a work to be truly good - unlike Lolita, he is not yet mature and in power, he has not yet perfected his abilities. I contemplated ( Read more... )

Managed to get out of the house today, with Line the Cripple (blisters, again, poor thing), to stuff our faces and exchange war stories. For one reason or another, we got oogled at a lot more than usual, and I can't figure what people found so peculiar about us today. I got came close to losing an ear-ring but got "Panik Manifesto" and a new ( Read more... )