It can be really tough keeping up on blogs. I continually try and set aside time to get some good work in, but continually I find myself at odds with my planned schedule. Now I’m sitting here without proper internet and missing nearly all my books –loaning books to friends though rewarding in sprit, is devastating to my library- My room is freezing and that damn music from the other room. I am becoming Kinbote. Except I don’t have nearly as much to say. But here are a couple things despite my bloggers-block.

In one of my earlier posts I cited a common place passage simply because found the prose to be aesthetically beautiful. Little did I know I was straddling a black and white (red/green) contrasting, crevasse of Kinbotes consciousness. It is at this moment we are exposed to not only the reality of John Shade’s Killer, the intention therein, but more importantly the surreality of Kinbote’s mind. I also believe that this passage and solely this passage reflects kinbote’s acknowledgment of said surreality. It as almost as if we the reader and Kinbote himself are touching the void.

“He did not bring up, my sweet old friend never did, ridiculous stories about te terrifying shadows that Judge Goldsworth’s gown threw across the underworld, or about this or that beast lying in prison and positively dying of raghdirst (thirst for revenge)—crass banalities circulated b the scurrilous and the heartless—by all those for whom romance, remoteness, sealskin-lined scarlet skies, the darkening dunes of a fabulous kingdom, simply do not exist. But enough of this. Let us turn to our Poet’s windows (Page 85).”

This is Quixoteism in Nabokovian fashion. He knows it’s a fantasy! He is admitting that everyone around him (post murder) are saying these “crass banalities” -drab bitter bland truths- about Shade’s murder. They threaten his own realty thus exposing its vulnerability. He won’t come out with it completely but we are exposed to the abyss. We sit upon the event horizon. I guess I am wrong to be critical and I don’t mean to be if I seem so, because even if Kinbote is crazy among other things. I still haven’t decide whose world I like more. Which one I’d like to subscribe to…those sealskin-lined scarlet skies seem to call to me. I know that with the Don I wanted the road to go on forever, so the party would never end. And this party’s just starting to get rowdy.

For anybody who likes the Highwaymen (Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, and Wallen Jennings) this is a link to the song The Road Goes on Forever and the Party Never Ends the only thing that plays this has a stupid stick figure movie but it’s still wicked cool.

various crumbs...

These are just some random things…

I know nothing. At least I didn’t. The other day in class when Parker came up and discussed how Kinbote essentially sucks, it really made me stop. And then I thought. I knew Kinbote was crazy, and wicked sketchy, but when I heard Parker talking about him, I at first felt offended, that I had to defend kinbote: he’s my boy even if he is crazy. Then i realized that I can’t really defend something that I don’t understand, or have really even read. Before Thursday I had read a good amount of pale fire, but I realized I was just reading it to get through it, not really to get into it. And this was wrong. We discussed the rungs of the literary ladder, and I saw that I was barely holding on to the bottom with oiled hands. It was a very humbling experience

So I decided to start over, and read it again. And I started to find stuff all over the place: Kinbote does indeed suck, but I realized too, that maybe I can start to defend him. He’s sort of become this George Kastanza character for me: a skeethy little bastard, but what a genius of one. He’s really tying the story together. And it’s hilarious in that Larry David sort of way.

Page 81in recalling advice given to Shade: “ ‘discussed making recordings of my voice for his use’” –this obviously would bug me, but in reading it, it cracks me up.

And now for something completely different:

“ the famous avenue of all the trees meantioned by Shakespeare, a distant droning sound, the hint of a haze, the turquoise drone of the Observatory, wisps d pale plumes of cirrus, and the poplar-curtained Roman-tiered football field, deserted on summer days except for a dreamy-eyed youngster flying-on a long control line in a droning circle— a motor-powered model plane.

Dear Jesus, do something. (92-93)”

I bring this passage up because there was one line which I actually misread (but I suspect that this may have been intentional) : “a distant droning sound, the hint of a haze” I my head I read it drowning sound, the hint of haze.

The rest of the passage I think is significant too, I’m not sure in what way (anybody?) but it was hard to find a proper place to stop.

Just a little common place…

“crass banalities circulated by the scurrilous and the heartless—by all those for whom romance, remoteness, sealskin-lined scarlet skies, the darkening dunes of a fabulous kingdom, simply do not exist. But enough of this. (85)”

and this is my waxwing, i have the suspicion it looks like everyone else's

short paper

Jon Orsi

Short Paper Page 57

Ouroboros: the snake that eats itself. Page 57: Lolita in a page. While Nabokov is not marred nor deeply invested in a tautological novel, page 57 of Lolita is an introspection, and distillation of the whole of book 1. The voice, subject, struggle, narration and eventual conclusion are all represented in nine, tight-but certainly not simple- sentences.

The passage begins, “Main Character: Humbert the Hummer. Time: Sunday morning in June. Place: sunlit living room. Props old, candy-stripped davenport…” The setup is that of stage direction, of a play. A play by Humbert, in which he is the writer/director, the puppeteer of his subjects. A prelude to an orchestration. This small passage is a mirror to the structure of Nabkov’s own role and work. The stage direction even posses the beauty and clever humor of book 1, “…and mementoes, among these Dolores, were all over the place.” The puppets tethers have been tied with tight poetry.

After the stage has been set, Humbert instantly drives toward the subject of the novel: Lolita: his sin his soul, our story. Lolita is immortalized in the beauty of this passage, the attention to obscure detail, careful crafting has made her into our (his) Venus. We are helpless to the visualization portrayed, “She wore that day a pretty pink dress that I had seen on her once before, ample in the skirt, tight in the bodice, short-sleeved, pink, checkered with darker pink…” Centered here in the passage, Lolita becomes the focus, the subject. We see her; she wears the dress of innocence. It floats as smoothly in our minds as it reads on paper.

Nabokov’s language radiates in these sentences profoundly as the whole of book 1 can accomplish, the beauty is lighting, and a picnic for the reader. Even the structure of the passage reads as we would see Lolita, slowly letting our gaze take her in, “…and, to complete the color scheme, she had painted her lips and was holding in her hollowed hands a beautiful, banal, Eden-red apple.” The subtleties grow and ripen. Temptation flowers. Even the reader, whether or not they will admit, wants a bite of that apple. This image of her tossing the apple and catching it with a “cupped polished plop.” Turns the written word into streaming realism, inducing a literary synesthesia. It also manages to turn character psyche, in that innocence is lost. Lolita-as Humbert would like us to believe- has become the seductress. Tossing. Tempting.

Humbert however, changes this, abruptly. This image of the seduction clad in innocence, flirts with the reader throughout book 1. In this passage, flirtation is carried out, temptation is presented, and in little time, the original sin is indulged, “Humbert Humbert intercepted the apple.” While graphic detail is spared, this passage and book is engrossed in that –awfully sensual- awful sensuality. As Humbert plucks Lolita’s fruit book one comes to a close.

The story has been completed. In the book’s most powerful concentration, Nabokov has saturated these short lines, the page almost leaks. Within the novel itself the story comes full circle, the serpent eats its tail. The content here will suffice for anyone unfamiliar with the book, they need only read these nine lines and they will be irrepressibly beckoned to either read Lolita by the fire, or throw the damned thing in.

Fractal literature

It’s hard going from a novel I’ve read twice, with the aid of the entire class and instructor I’ve been thoroughly digesting, to being on my own again with another piece of raw book. And it’s a tough one to cook. But I’ve been getting into it. To begin with; Does this book remind anyone else of Humboldt’s Gift? Maybe I should ask if anyone’s ever even read that? -Saul Bellow won the nobel prize for literature. Referred to by Nabokov as “miserable mediocrity”- anyway it reminds me of it. Then again I’m not very far along so who am I to say? Aside, I’m pretty sure that Charles Kinbote is totally crazy. –or maybe I am which, like Kyle, is becoming strong possibility- because there are all sorts of strange things being said, maybe I just don’t understand it yet, but on page 15 “…forming together with the shorter flanks twin wings of five hundred verse each, and damn that music.” Or on 93 at the bottom of the first paragraph an odd interjection of “Dear Jesus, do something.” Maybe the distraction has something to do with the “amusement park” that’s apparently in front of his house, but I think it may be beyond that. On a page I cannot remember Sybil says simply “What’s more, you are insane”. And what’s more Kinbote seems to do a lot of what I would consider sketchy behavior, i.e. creeping around these people’s house and looking in the windows.

But then I come to a sobering discovery: that I, we as a reader, are just like (simile), or we are (metaphor…stronger) Charles Kinbote. Always poking around some famous poets work, trying to dissect and discern meaning from scraps of possibly meaningless information. Take for example this blog-I don’t really know what I’m talking about but, I’m wicked giddy because I think ive found something. Even though I’ve yet to do the assignment of annotating a page, I feel like Kinbote in that I’ve got all these notes and side notes on all this stuff. When reading Lolita I had all these clues and maps kind of like Quilty, and man, its all catching up that I maybe metamorphing into a Nabokov character. Maybe I am going to deep, or still stuck on the Lolita fact finding mission, or maybe this is the point of reading., of dedicated reading. Because clearly this is book is beautiful, and the beauty of the story is the annotation. It is the beauty we can find in the description of a simple photograph. The deeper you go the more you find. even web blogging, And I can assure you classmates- as I have been reading almost everyone’s- butterflies are hatching from your blogs.