lo li ta
joanna newsom interview from "dusted":
I think I was hugely influenced -- I don’t know to what extent it comes across -- but I love Nabokov, especially his gift for stringing words together, and his sense of how different words impact each other when they bump up at the edges. Like a really long strange word next to a really small, colloquial, and familiar word. And also the fact that English was his second language, sort of imparts on his diction this hypersensitivity. He’s always, always watching himself, making sure that every single word he chooses is perfect, and because of that, it’s sort of like the highest form of an English sentence, even more than one by someone who’s born here. But it also has this wonderful sense of disorientation; there’s always a bizarre element to every sentence he puts together, because it is not an inborn language. There’s something inspiring to me about that, but I’m not sure in what way that affects the way that I write.
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My professor went to Cornell, and he said that local lore has it that Nabokov would ride the busses around town, listening to teenage girls speak so that he could capture it in his books
I think I was hugely influenced -- I don’t know to what extent it comes across -- but I love Nabokov, especially his gift for stringing words together, and his sense of how different words impact each other when they bump up at the edges. Like a really long strange word next to a really small, colloquial, and familiar word. And also the fact that English was his second language, sort of imparts on his diction this hypersensitivity. He’s always, always watching himself, making sure that every single word he chooses is perfect, and because of that, it’s sort of like the highest form of an English sentence, even more than one by someone who’s born here. But it also has this wonderful sense of disorientation; there’s always a bizarre element to every sentence he puts together, because it is not an inborn language. There’s something inspiring to me about that, but I’m not sure in what way that affects the way that I write.
________________
My professor went to Cornell, and he said that local lore has it that Nabokov would ride the busses around town, listening to teenage girls speak so that he could capture it in his books